DISSINET newsletter 12/2024
Dear friends and colleagues,
As the end of the 2024 calendar year approaches, it is a good time to get back in touch and update you on exciting new developments at DISSINET. It has been a year of intense research and writing, and we are proud to have continued our record of innovative publications and development of groundbreaking methodologies in the digital humanities.
Recent publications
“Modeling systems of sentencing in early inquisition trials: Crime, social connectivity, and punishment in the register of Peter Seila (1241–2)”, by Robert L. J. Shaw, Tomáš Hampejs and David Zbíral, was published in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. This article showcases how our custom data collection approach, entitled “Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling” (CASTEMO), allows for unprecedented attention to detail in studying the interplay of numerous variables in inquisition records. Our capture of textual information as structured data using CASTEMO provides concrete answers to a vaguely understood dimension of inquisitorial decision-making: how an inquisitor decided on punishments for dissidents.
Robert L. J. Shaw, Kaarel Sikk and David Zbíral investigate an entirely different dimension of inquisitorial operations in “Toponymic surnames and the spatiality of heresy prosecutions: Peter Seila’s register of sentences from the Quercy region (Languedoc), 1241–1242”, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. By quantifying the social and cultural context of toponymic surnames in thirteenth-century Languedoc and then geocoding the data derived from these names, the article sheds new light on how spatial constraints influenced the operations of a thirteenth-century inquisitor.
Shifting from Languedoc to Pomerania, Reima Välimäki and David Zbíral have co-authored a chapter for the new collaborative volume on the history of the Waldensians (Francesca Tasca, ed. Storia dei valdesi I: Come nuovi apostoli (secc. XII-XV). Torino: Claudiana), on “Social network analysis of German-speaking Waldensian communities at the end of the 14th century” (in Italian). The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the suspects, their kinship ties, and dissident interactions in the extant protocols from the Stettin inquisition against Waldensians in 1392-4.
In addition to publicising research in scholarly journals and edited volumes, we also share certain publications directly on our website. Most recently, Katia Riccardo, Peter Ondrejka, and David Zbíral produced this interactive map of the occupations, dissident religious affiliations, and locations of residence of nearly 900 persons suspected of heresy in the inquisition register of Bologna, 1291–1310.
Our bibliography, focusing predominantly on medieval religion, Christian dissidence, inquisition, and the digital humanities has reached over 9,000 items; it is publicly available at https://www.zotero.org/groups/446972/dissident_networks_project/library (and in the Zotero application).
Upcoming research
DISSINET has been working on an article on the Cathar practice of endura, available now in preprint: Zbíral, David, and Katalin Suba. “Between Fasting and Religious Suicide: A Data-Oriented Reconsideration of the Practice of Endura in Medieval Heterodox Christianity.” Zenodo, September 9, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13736627. The article offers a systematic survey of evidence from inquisition records concerning the controversial practice of endura, a strict form of fasting practised by Cathar Christians in southwestern France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
The corpus strand of our research is also well underway, and we anticipate significant progress on that front next year.
Data snapshots
Last but not least, DISSINET has launched a new online initiative entitled Data Snapshots: Visual Microstories from DISSINET’s Research Workbench. Each Snapshot centres around one visualisation of case data sourced from one or more inquisitorial registers and offers a quick glimpse into published or ongoing research. Each image not only tells a story about what kind of data we collect, but how we classify and think about them during the research process. Our first data snapshot provides an interactive way to learn about the way individual narratives of religious dissidence were structured in Peter Seila’s register.
Thank you for your continued interest in our work, which we hope you will carry into the new year. We look forward to sharing our upcoming publications and research with you.
The DISSINET team
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