Inquisition trial records contain many stories of how heresy suspects became involved in religious dissidence. Debate has raged over the extent to which these tales represent an accurate portrayal of dissident life or rather an imposed “construction” of their persecutors. Yet such discussions have inevitably focused on select, often exceptional, testimonies. By contrast, a new DISSINET study of narrative components and sequencing in Peter Seila’s register of sentences (1241–2, Languedoc) uses computation to systematically analyse hundreds of crime summaries. The patterns uncovered reveal traces of how the voices of inquisitor, notary and suspects were interwoven and illuminate the process by which dissident narratives were – in the most neutral sense of the term – constructed.
In an article recently published in Historical Research (Oxford University Press), Robert L. J. Shaw, Tomáš Hampejs, and David Zbíral study the 649 summaries of guilt in the mid-thirteenth century sentence register of Peter Seila, one of the first inquisitors appointed in Languedoc. Following the Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO) approach, we encoded every clause of these summaries as a structured data statement, preserving their original order. This allowed us to analyse both the types of crimes recorded and the sequence in which they were narrated. Our key findings include:
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