IMC 2024: Sessions

Language plays a critical role in both religious self-definition and in attacking religious doctrines, practices and adherents. Everything from basic vocabulary through to style of argumentation can serve to define and delimit religious right from religious wrong. Choice of language also creates connections that go beyond the religious, tying religious ideas, actions and people to broader socio-cultural attitudes. The importance of language is particularly well-recognised within the study of heresy and its repression. From one aspect, the construction of heresy debate has attuned us to the way in which language used by polemicists and inquisitors could be influenced by their fears and expectations and engender categorisations distorting the beliefs and practices of dissidents. From another, researchers have sometimes attempted to peer beneath such formulae by searching for language that breaks the mould. Much, however, remains to be done in describing and analysing the use of language across the widest spectrum of sources, in looking beyond Western Europe, and in applying new methods. This series of panels aims to help correct this deficit: its papers look at inquisition trial records, polemical and descriptive texts and historical narratives from across Europe, and bring together classical methods with digital approaches to analysing language.