The DISSINET (Dissident Networks Project) research group is releasing Locations mentioned in medieval inquisition registers: Interactive map, a web application that makes searchable and filterable a dataset of geocoded place mentions drawn from sixteen medieval inquisitorial registers. The underlying dataset, DISSILOC: A dataset of geocoded locations mentioned in medieval inquisition registers, is published concurrently on Zenodo.
The interactive map presents nearly 6,000 place mentions attested in inquisitorial records spanning the 1230s to the 1520s, covering especially southern France (Languedoc), north-central Italy, England, Central Europe, and the Baltic region. Each point represents one place name as attested in a source register. Users can filter by register and by location type (settlement, church, region, and so on).
Place mentions are heterogeneous in origin: they include locations of inquisitorial events and proceedings as well as places of residence and toponymic surnames of suspects, witnesses, inquisitors, and notaries. The presence of a place in the map does not imply that heretical or inquisitorial activity occurred there.
Cross-register identifications of the same real-world place are expressed through a preferred/canonical-variant structure, so all register-level attestations are retained in full. The epistemic basis of coordinates is recorded, distinguishing directly geocoded entries from those whose coordinates were inherited from a containing (superordinate) or nearby geocodable place.
DISSILOC brings together ca. 6,000 place mentions into a single, cross-register spatial dataset. It is the output of long-term, intensive work on inquisitorial records carried out by the DISSINET team. Of the entries, ca. 5,000 carry geocoded coordinates; the remainder are documented as named place entities, available for future spatial enrichment as identification work continues.
The gazetteer is especially valuable for the cross-language mapping of place names and for locating small and obscure locations. A part of the settlements, hamlets, parishes, and ecclesiastical sites are attested almost exclusively in notarial usage, and their Latin forms make them distinctive anchors for identification. The strongest geographic coverage follows the main theatres of medieval inquisitorial activity: Languedoc and parts of Catalonia, north-central Italy, England (Lollard material from Norwich, Kent, and Coventry), and the Baltic region around Stettin.
DISSILOC follows a variant-record model: each attested place name is preserved as a separate row, with cross-register identifications encoded through a preferred/canonical_id mechanism rather than by collapsing entries. Place-type classification and geocoding — the principal contributions of the DISSINET team — are recorded in dedicated columns. The dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Map: Locations mentioned in medieval inquisition registers: Interactive map
Dataset on Zenodo: DISSILOC: A dataset of geocoded locations mentioned in medieval inquisition registers
A visualisation of DISSINET's more than 11,000-item Zotero library mapped by subject domain, root collection down to individual topic, shows the team’s focus in bibliographic terms, and how that reading spans history, network science, and computational text analysis.
