Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DISSINET (Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-09-01 bis 2023-02-28
The project aims at “networked” understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe through a vast computational analysis of the social, spatial, and textual relationships by which they were formed and recorded. Rather than treating these cultures through narrative case-study or traditional social-historical analysis, our approach builds upwards from the microscopic details of human interactivity towards a broader social picture.
There is an urgent need for such a bridging framework, capable of engaging with the different modalities and contexts of involvement, the different kinds of interactions people undertook, the dynamic flow and negotiation
of beliefs, practices and institutions, and ultimately the emergence of a religious culture.This perspective has the potential to deeply transform the study of heresy and overcome the binary opposition between approaches that emphasize common organisational structures and shared elements in beliefs and practices on the one hand, and those that stress the ever-changing, fugitive, and haphazard character of medieval dissidence on the other.
The overall objectives engage with three crucial facets of medieval dissident cultures:
Firstly, the social patterns of dissident religious cultures; we aim to dig beneath the demography of dissent and focus on how particular relations and interactions among individuals created broader social patterns. Research questions asked: To what extent did the various dissident networks described in inquisitorial records revolve around key individuals and groups? Which categories of actors (by gender, occupation, marital status, spatial mobility, etc.) appear to be the most important for the actual cohesion of these networks, to judge by the different perspectives on centrality provided by social network analysis? What were the flows traversing networks involved in dissent (e.g. information, beliefs, narratives, money, gifts, books, spiritual benefits, etc.), which actors engaged in them, and what do the flows tell us about the material, spiritual, and information economies that existed among those investigated?
Secondly, inquire into the spatial dimensions of dissent, and systematically address the following questions: Do inquisitorial records suggest that some key individuals and categories of people within dissident milieux were more mobile than others? To what extent do we find different spatial distributions of beliefs, practices, and institutions within dissident networks and inquisitorial registers? Do these distributions correlate in any way with the presence of official Church infrastructure, physical geography, and proxy data for medieval demography?
Thirdly, our research addresses the emergence of broader socio-cultural phenomena from local interactions, with the aim to answer the following questions: What individual characteristics, self-organizing mechanisms, and ties of various kinds might account for the dissident social networks we observe in inquisitorial records? What is the relative importance of these different factors? How do the “religious” layers of the networks, such as the transmission of beliefs and engagement in rituals, relate to their “social” layers?
There is an urgent need for such a bridging framework, capable of engaging with the different modalities and contexts of involvement, the different kinds of interactions people undertook, the dynamic flow and negotiation
of beliefs, practices and institutions, and ultimately the emergence of a religious culture.This perspective has the potential to deeply transform the study of heresy and overcome the binary opposition between approaches that emphasize common organisational structures and shared elements in beliefs and practices on the one hand, and those that stress the ever-changing, fugitive, and haphazard character of medieval dissidence on the other.
The overall objectives engage with three crucial facets of medieval dissident cultures:
Firstly, the social patterns of dissident religious cultures; we aim to dig beneath the demography of dissent and focus on how particular relations and interactions among individuals created broader social patterns. Research questions asked: To what extent did the various dissident networks described in inquisitorial records revolve around key individuals and groups? Which categories of actors (by gender, occupation, marital status, spatial mobility, etc.) appear to be the most important for the actual cohesion of these networks, to judge by the different perspectives on centrality provided by social network analysis? What were the flows traversing networks involved in dissent (e.g. information, beliefs, narratives, money, gifts, books, spiritual benefits, etc.), which actors engaged in them, and what do the flows tell us about the material, spiritual, and information economies that existed among those investigated?
Secondly, inquire into the spatial dimensions of dissent, and systematically address the following questions: Do inquisitorial records suggest that some key individuals and categories of people within dissident milieux were more mobile than others? To what extent do we find different spatial distributions of beliefs, practices, and institutions within dissident networks and inquisitorial registers? Do these distributions correlate in any way with the presence of official Church infrastructure, physical geography, and proxy data for medieval demography?
Thirdly, our research addresses the emergence of broader socio-cultural phenomena from local interactions, with the aim to answer the following questions: What individual characteristics, self-organizing mechanisms, and ties of various kinds might account for the dissident social networks we observe in inquisitorial records? What is the relative importance of these different factors? How do the “religious” layers of the networks, such as the transmission of beliefs and engagement in rituals, relate to their “social” layers?
Within the Reporting Period 1, the project “Networks of Dissent” has fully developed its approach to the collection of syntactic-semantic data from historical texts, CASTEMO (Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling), and has published the application to build CASTEMO knowledge graphs, InkVisitor, open-source and under an open licence. The newly constituted team has been working on manual collection of structured data from medieval heresy trial records from various regions of Europe and various periods (1230s to 1520s) and on the constitution of a segmented textual corpus to provide not only a new understanding of medieval inquisitorial and dissident cultures and their interaction, but also the behaviour of premodern people under pressure, the formation of covert networks, and the emergence of a religious culture from local interactions. On the basis of this original data, we have produced public outcomes such as interactive maps, articles in academic journals, outreach articles, and podcasts, allowing both the academic community and the broader public to gain new knowledge of religious dissidence, inquisition, and the dynamics of personal interactions in premodern societies. The team members presented the outcomes at domestic as well as international conferences.
The study of religious dissent and attempts at its repression played a pivotal role in the cross-fertilization between history and the social sciences throughout the 20th century. Dissent was also instrumental in debates over the social roots and social nature – or otherwise – of medieval religious movements. A crucial turn in the dialogue between research into medieval dissent and the social sciences was the Royaumont conference in 1962, which highlighted the social milieus inclined to dissent, its geographic distribution and transmission, and the mobility of dissidents as crucial topics for further research. However, the prevailing approaches have focused on close reading of the narratives offered by inquisitiorial records. The DISSINET project aims to fill in this gap by combining qualitative detail with a more formalized approach, computer-assisted approach.
he understanding that religious cultures and other social phenomena emerge from various kinds of relations and interactions between particular people can form the basis for a practical methodological framework. Using the latest computational methods, we can bridge the qualitative and the statistical, the local and the widespread, and the micro- and the macro- levels in the analysis of medieval religious dissent and inquisition. Systematically analysing this relational information, recorded in rich detail in inquisitorial records, will allow us to transform historiographical and methodological perspectives on two critical topics concerning medieval dissent and inquisition: the social and spatial aspects of medieval dissident cultures; and the study of inquisition as an interactive process.
Geography of heresy has been lacking a more “bottom-up” understanding of medieval dissident cultures in all their complexity from small-scale configurations of local and long-range relationships and interactions. The second area – the study of the interaction between inquisitors and those under suspicion – would also benefit significantly from a new methodology. In modern historiography, inquisition has been considered from the perspective of legal and institutional history, and as part of a wider cultural process of the repression of heresy. Intersecting with this, another avenue of research has focused on the construction of heresy by its persecutors. Research into the textual imprint, found within inquisitorial records, of the interaction dynamics between inquisition and those investigated has significantly reconfigured the field and resulted in some of the most theoretically engaging contributions. Taken together, they suggest a direction of research that has yet to be explored for want of suitable methodologies: that is, the combination of deep-qualitative and broad-quantitative perspectives through a more systematic modelling of inquisitor-dissident interaction across a wide body of cases.
The DISSINET project aims to open up new perspectives on these significant questions through a deeply interdisciplinary methodological approach that we frame as computational modelling. Bringing together a complex data model that can handle qualitative subtlety and quantitative bulk, and the techniques of social network analysis (SNA), geographic information science (GIS), and computational text analysis (CTA), DISSINET has the potential to radically reorient research concerning medieval dissident cultures and the interplay between inquisition and a society under suspicion. In addition, our involvement with the broader field of social-scientific research will provide new insights for the study of premodern society, covert networks and their repression, and the dynamics of religious culture.
he understanding that religious cultures and other social phenomena emerge from various kinds of relations and interactions between particular people can form the basis for a practical methodological framework. Using the latest computational methods, we can bridge the qualitative and the statistical, the local and the widespread, and the micro- and the macro- levels in the analysis of medieval religious dissent and inquisition. Systematically analysing this relational information, recorded in rich detail in inquisitorial records, will allow us to transform historiographical and methodological perspectives on two critical topics concerning medieval dissent and inquisition: the social and spatial aspects of medieval dissident cultures; and the study of inquisition as an interactive process.
Geography of heresy has been lacking a more “bottom-up” understanding of medieval dissident cultures in all their complexity from small-scale configurations of local and long-range relationships and interactions. The second area – the study of the interaction between inquisitors and those under suspicion – would also benefit significantly from a new methodology. In modern historiography, inquisition has been considered from the perspective of legal and institutional history, and as part of a wider cultural process of the repression of heresy. Intersecting with this, another avenue of research has focused on the construction of heresy by its persecutors. Research into the textual imprint, found within inquisitorial records, of the interaction dynamics between inquisition and those investigated has significantly reconfigured the field and resulted in some of the most theoretically engaging contributions. Taken together, they suggest a direction of research that has yet to be explored for want of suitable methodologies: that is, the combination of deep-qualitative and broad-quantitative perspectives through a more systematic modelling of inquisitor-dissident interaction across a wide body of cases.
The DISSINET project aims to open up new perspectives on these significant questions through a deeply interdisciplinary methodological approach that we frame as computational modelling. Bringing together a complex data model that can handle qualitative subtlety and quantitative bulk, and the techniques of social network analysis (SNA), geographic information science (GIS), and computational text analysis (CTA), DISSINET has the potential to radically reorient research concerning medieval dissident cultures and the interplay between inquisition and a society under suspicion. In addition, our involvement with the broader field of social-scientific research will provide new insights for the study of premodern society, covert networks and their repression, and the dynamics of religious culture.