The DISSINET (Dissident Networks Project) research group is releasing Medieval inquisition records: Interactive map, a web application bringing together metadata for a corpus of medieval inquisitorial registers and, where available, their geocoded place-name content. The underlying metadata dataset, Medieval inquisition records metadata, is published concurrently on Zenodo.
The map covers inquisitorial documentation from the 1230s to the early sixteenth century, with the strongest coverage of processes against 'Cathars', 'Waldensians', 'Lollards', 'Guglielmites', and the lay movement of the 'Apostles' in Languedoc, North-Central Italy, Switzerland, the Holy Roman Empire, and England. Known but lost registers are not included; notable remaining gaps include processes against radical mystics and the 'Heresy of the Free Spirit', as well as most material on 'Spiritual Franciscans' and 'Hussites'.
Each register is represented by a map marker placed at its location of creation. Clicking on a marker opens a detailed info card containing the full metadata record for the given text: its category, prevalent document type, state of conservation, language, inquisitors and notaries, location of creation, dates, manuscripts, and editions. For registers where a geocoded location dataset has been compiled, small coloured points show all geocoded place names mentioned in the records, providing an index of the toponymic content of each text.
The map includes several filtering controls. The creation date slider limits the display to texts whose creation period falls within the selected range. The prevalent document type filter narrows the dataset to specific document types, and the language filter limits display to registers written in a given language. A dedicated toggle restricts the view to registers for which a geocoded place-name dataset is available.
The map draws on two published datasets. The metadata table for the registers themselves compiles information that is rarely assembled in one place: chronological bounds expressed as earliest and latest possible start and end dates, manuscript shelfmarks, and references to critical editions. It also includes quantitative measures drawn from the underlying corpus — character and token counts, trial event counts, numbers of persons and suspect individuals, and the proportion of geocoded location mentions — figures that provide, for the first time, a comparative picture of the size, documentary density, and – for some – spatial coverage of these registers.
The geocoded place-name content visible on the map is drawn from DISSILOC, a cross-register gazetteer of ca. 6,000 place mentions from sixteen registers, released concurrently and available separately on Zenodo.
Datasets:
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.
