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:
As part of DISSINET's corpus work, we have procured a transcription of the hitherto unpublished register of John Galand and William of Saint-Seine, 1283–1302, that we have made available in the Zenodo repository.
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for extracting information from historical texts. If used appropriately, they can speed up the research process, compensating for resource limitations and helping researchers achieve ambitious objectives in quantitative cultural history.
