Reading three centuries of inquisitorial testimony at scale, DISSINET’s new study follows contestation along four lines. It is a step towards a cultural macrohistory of dissent, and our first study to combine human-validated LLM annotation with manually annotated data. By religious group, dissident cultures fall into two families: reformists directed their criticism at the existing Church, whereas separatists were already investing more in a community of their own. Contrary to expectation, women and countryfolk were more likely than men and city-dwellers to challenge the Church. Finally, the study confirms that contestation grew between 1243 and 1522.
A new DISSINET study in the Journal of Cultural Analytics (Princeton University) looks at how people accused of heresy challenged religious authorities (the Church hierarchy, religious orders, inquisitors) in medieval Europe. The piece places the DISSINET project on the map of “cultural macrohistory”, still much less developed than macrohistorical approaches in social and economic history, but holding clear potential. While we are most known for detailed computational source work, here we look at three centuries of contestation, using state-of-the-art information extraction methods. Based on 4,433 testimonies from twenty inquisitorial registers covering the period 1243–1522, we find differences between religious groups, as well as variation by gender, urban vs. rural setting, and period. Our results challenge the view that all dissident religious cultures of medieval Europe were mainly reformistic and in a way interchangeable. Instead, the study allowed us to propose their categorization in two categories, more formally established than hitherto, that we label “separatists” and “reformists”, with separatists caring less about the criticism of the church, and rather already building their small church apart.
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Reference:
Brys, Zoltan, Robert L. J. Shaw, Gideon Kotzé, and David Zbíral. ‘Correlates of Contestation against Religious Authorities in Medieval Inquisitorial Testimonies’. Journal of Cultural Analytics 11, no. 3 (2026). https://doi.org/10.22148/jca.1098.
A visualisation of DISSINET's more than 11,000-item Zotero library mapped by subject domain, root collection down to individual topic, shows the team’s focus in bibliographic terms, and how that reading spans history, network science, and computational text analysis.
