Abstract
This article investigates the spread of inquisition as an influential administrative technique across thirteenth-century Europe in religious, civil, and governmental fields. It shows how by looking at the single life of Gui Foucois (d. 1268), who inquired for the church and state, first as a French lawyer and administrator and eventually as Pope Clement IV. The details varied, but the constituent elements of an inquisition were very similar: questionnaires, local interrogation, recording and archival collection, abbreviation, and review. These elements of knowledge production served an impressive range of goals: to prove sanctity, to prove heresy, to prove ownership, and to repair wrongs done by those in power. I argue that the rationality of these inquisitions was not something determined unilaterally, but with a view to securing the consent of the publics who ultimately produced the inquisitorial knowledge and often consumed it. Inquisitions were so successful precisely because their dynamics could be both assertive and responsive, coercive and permissive, with legibility operating back and forth between “publics” and powers. By reconstructing the knowledge produced by these due processes, this article shows how the bureaucratic-juridical treatment of public knowledge rendered it reliable through a critical, expert process of inspection and analysis. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Highlights
This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen
It shows how by looking at the single life of Gui Foucois (d. 1268), who inquired for the church and state, first as a French lawyer and administrator and eventually as Pope Clement IV
I argue that the rationality of these inquisitions was not something determined unilaterally, but with a view to securing the consent of the publics who produced the inquisitorial knowledge and often consumed it
Summary
This article investigates the spread of inquisition as an influential administrative technique across thirteenth-century Europe in religious, civil, and governmental fields. Gui Foucois was involved in: advising Occitan Dominicans on heretical inquisitions; Occitan seignorial investigations into rights, lands, and comital misrule; French royal enquêtes into governmental misrule; legatine investigations and negotiations into English political disputes; and papal inquisitions into ostensible French and Polish saints.[12] He is a highly instructive figure through whom to investigate similarities and differences in inquisitorial “knowledge practices” (notably, their public aspects), the “knowledge” these investigations produced, and the uses made of them—laterally and outside their conventional historiographical boxes.[13] “The public” was often the end audience of inquisitorial results, even if other experts were intermediate audiences, or God the absolute one
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