Abstract
MS 609 of the Bibliotheque municipale de Toulouse contains the registry of the largest known medieval inquisition, the so-called ‘Great Inquisition’ lead by two Dominicans at Toulouse between 1245 and 1246. Since its discovery in the nineteenth century, this registry has remained unedited and is rarely studied in detail. Yet it has become famous for being the record of a broad inquisition into the ‘general state of the faith’, one that affirms that Catharism – the theory of a dualist, organized heretical counter-Church which brought the Albigensian crusade and eventual inquisition to the lands of the Count of Toulouse – was widespread between Toulouse and Carcassonne. This article argues that the registry does not record any general survey of Cathar heresy among the population, but rather it records an inquisition principally aimed at collecting evidence against village consulates who had no greater or lesser relationship to any ‘heresy’ than the rest of the population. This argument is made by challenging the historiographic bias towards sampling the registry anecdotally, replacing it with an evaluation based on a combination of macroanalysis and close reading facilitated by the author’s digital edition of MS 609 and network analysis techniques.
Highlights
Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities
39 With the exception of hereticus, the inquisitors did not use the categories of transgression which they described in their manuals such as credens, fautor, receptator, defensor, inter alia (Arnold, 2001: 33–47, especially 42–43)
We can dispense with the ambiguous ‘great families’ and substitute it for an identifiable trait shared by all the targeted people and families: they populated the consulates of le Mas and Saint-Martin
Summary
Re-mapping the ‘Great Inquisition’ of 1245–46: The Case of Mas-SaintesPuelles and Saint-Martin-Lalande. What I discovered during the act of creating a native digital edition21 – reading, transcribing, encoding, tagging, and connecting depositions – was that these Dominicans were emphatically not conducting a general survey of the faith; rather, the friars Bernard and Johan collected evidence to incriminate a particular social group in the villages of the Lauragais: the village consuls These consuls were not united by any special relationship to whatever heresis inquisitors believed was rife in the Midi, nor were they greater or lesser practitioners of any such heresis. Azals Raimund de Verazilh Raimund Folquet Raimund Fornier Ysarn de Gibel ‘pluries alios’
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