The project aims at a “networked” understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe by way of a comprehensive computational approach to 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 functioning of a religious culture. This perspective has the potential to deeply transform the study of heresy and overcome the binary opposition between approaches that emphasisze 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.
We want to achieve the following objectives:
1. remodel our knowledge of medieval religious dissidence, inquisition, and inquisition records by providing transparent answers informed by computational approaches;
2. theorise more general aspects of human social behaviour in the premodern world based on relational data from inquisition records (e.g. exchange, mobility, gendered patterns in human agency and interaction, the formation and functioning of religious networks, etc.);
3. raise the bar in the application of quantitative approaches in historical research by using state-of-the-art methods;
4. reach a new level of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization between history, social sciences, and computational approaches.
