A new study in Reti Medievali Rivista challenges the idea that medieval religious dissent in Bologna was driven by occupation or wealth. Analyzing inquisition and tax records as a comparative baseline, the authors show that heresy clustered in specific neighborhoods due to social and spatial networks, rather than economic status or craft affiliation.
Our new study Occupation, Socioeconomic Status, and Dissidence in Bologna around 1300 revisits long-standing historiographical assumptions about the social background of religious dissent: Was religious dissent in medieval Bologna tied to specific professions or economic classes? Using the inquisition register (1291–1310) and the 1296–97 estimo (tax records), we compared suspects of heresy with the broader urban population.
Key insights:
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.
