Gender and Heresy lecture by David Zbíral at the University of Bologna

Inquire - International Centre for Research on Inquisitions at the University of Bologna and Centre of Digital Research of Religion at the Department for the Study of Religions, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University invite you to David Zbíral’s presentation about the gender aspects of dissident actions covered by medieval inquisition trials. On the basis of a full-text corpus amounting to ca. 2 million words of digitised and manually cleaned editions of twenty-five collections of heresy trial documents ranging from 1230s to 1520s and from Italy to England, the lecture is going to explore the verbs used to describe the actions of medieval women in comparison to the actions of men, and discover whether some categories of the reported actions were more typical of men than of women. It will thus attempt to inform the classical historiographical question of potential special roles in the day-to-day life of dissident religious cultures of the Middle Ages from a novel, data-driven, full-text-corpus-based perspective.