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IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 1032: Inquisitors' Knowledge at the Crossroads of Various Cultural Resources, I

Wednesday 5 July 2017, 09.00-10.30

Sponsor:Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Brno
Organiser:David Zbíral, Department for the Study of Religions, Masarykova univerzita, Brno
Moderator/Chair:Rachel Ernst, Department of History, Georgia State University
Paper 1032-aTalk of the Town as a Resource for Late 13th-Century Heresy Inquisitors
(Language: English)
Saku Pihko, Trivium - Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval & Early Modern Studies, University of Tampere
Index terms: Anthropology, Folk Studies, Literacy and Orality, Religious Life
Paper 1032-bRecords of a Remembered Past: Memory and Remembering in the Toulouse Inquisition Depositions of Doat 25 and 26, 1273-1282
(Language: English)
Elinor French, School of Philosophical, Historical & International Studies, Monash University, Victoria
Index terms: Anthropology, Folk Studies, Literacy and Orality, Religious Life
Paper 1032-cAccepting the Evil Spirit: How the Use of Multiple Cultural Resources Made the Witchcraft Stories Plausible in Hans Fründ's Report on the Witches in Valais, 1428
(Language: English)
František Novotný, Department for the Study of Religions, Masarykova univerzita, Brno
Index terms: Anthropology, Folk Studies, Literacy and Orality, Sexuality
Abstract

It is still customary to endow medieval inquisitors with complete control over the records and the knowledge they produced. However, this obscures the fact that, to a large extent, inquisitors' texts were formed by more obscure and more locally specific knowledge. They are the outcomes of various resources including not only inquisitors' manuals or treatises on heresy, but also the inquisitors' biographies and experience, the deponents' memories, gossip, folk tales, and dissidents' own texts and preaching, not to mention the influence of social ties and the political interests of various participants in the process of the text production. This set of two sessions aims to investigate how such cultural resources came together and influenced the inquisitors' knowledge, and what it means for the interpretation of inquisitional records and other texts produced by inquisitors.