DISSINET Newsletter | Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET)

	19 Dec 2025, 20:31
DISSINET Newsletter

Dear friends colleagues,

As the year draws to a close, the DISSINET team is proud to share some of our recent successes – including two new articles and several online resources – that reflect our continued commitment to pushing the boundaries of digitally-oriented historical research. We hope you enjoy reading!

New publications

How do inquisition trial records tell stories of heresy?

A new DISSINET study of narrative components and sequencing in Peter Seila’s register of sentences (1241–2, Languedoc), published in Historical Research, 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 constructed.

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Occupation, socioeconomic status, and dissidence in medieval Bologna

A new study in Reti Medievali Rivista challenges the idea that medieval religious dissent in Bologna was driven by occupation or wealth. By analysing inquisition and tax records comparatively, the authors show that heresy clustered in specific neighborhoods due to social and spatial networks rather than economic status or craft affiliation.

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New resources

DISSICON: DISSINET lexico-semantic dataset now online

The DISSICON dataset (which stands for DISSINET Conceptual Network) provides the lexico-semantic framework that the DISSINET project has developed since 2019. It offers an ontology that formalizes actions, concepts, and their relationships – as they appear in the context of Latin sources – to support computational analyses of historical material.

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Papal inquest from Doat 32 and other Doat materials published

In a continuation of DISSINET's corpus work, we have published new transcriptions from the Doat collection, including the papal inquest preserved in Doat 32, which sheds light on the ideal procedural standards expected in the inquisitorial practice, and additional materials useful for exploring dissident networks in medieval Languedoc.

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