The Heresy Trial of Bernard-Oth of Niort and His Family, 1234/5: Computing Discourses of Guilt at the Dawn of the Languedocian Inquisition
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In 1234 (or possibly 1235), at least 114 witnesses were called to provide evidence concerning the ties of Bernard-Oth of Niort, his mother, and three of his brothers to the heretici of the Lauragais region. The resulting record is the earliest surviving record of a medieval heresy trial. Yet, it is also one of the least studied, perhaps due to its rather unusual appearance. Unlike the majority of later Languedocian inquisition records, the 1234/5 proceedings represent a focused evidence gathering against a set of predefined suspects, with inquisitors specially appointed for that purpose, and the charges seem more concerned with reputation than fact. The process, moreover, bears the signs of political influence, above all that of Peter Amiel, archbishop of Narbonne. This paper demonstrates how computational analysis can provide a new and much needed source-critical perspective on this all-too-neglected text. Modelling the entire text as a series of syntactic-semantic data statements – following the Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling (CASTEMO) approach – provides a foundation for illuminating one of the earliest interactions between inquisition and Languedocian society. The data capture process itself is shown to provide a facilitating form of close reading: systematically reconstructing every clause of the text as a data statement revealed otherwise hard-to-see patterns in textual discourse and its context (i.e. the responses of the witnesses and the way those witnesses are characterized in the text). Subsequent data analysis of the relationships between these features serve to unravel the text’s conditions of production and even tell the human story behind the record. |
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