Requesting incriminations of others was a key mechanism through which medieval inquisitors of heresy gained knowledge of new suspects. At the same time, incriminations might betray some social biases of either the deponents or the inquisitors. We looked at incriminations in the register of the inquisition of Bologna, 1291-1310, and using statistical models for social networks, we found that women tended to incriminate other women in this register, while men incriminated across genders. We also bring evidence of other social biases in medieval incriminations.
In a study published in PLOS One, we aimed at disentangling selected social factors of incrimination in the register of the inquisition in Bologna, 1291–1310. We used social network analysis and, more specifically, an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) to assess the influence of four social predictors: gender, churchperson status, membership of the urban “middle class”, and kinship ties between incriminators and the incriminated. To increase the validity of our results, we controlled for various trial circumstances and structural parameters of the incrimination network. Our most important findings include:
The full open-access text of the article in the journal (with the possibility of pdf download).
DISSINET has published a new article on toponymic surnames and the spatiality of heresy prosecutions in a Springer-Nature journal, contributing to systematic analysis of European inquisition records as structured data.
DISSINET article applying computational methods to sentencing in early inquisition trials published in a top ranking journal Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History.
