Women, Men, and Medieval Heresy : Tackling an Old Question through Network Analysis
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The role played by women in medieval dissident movements has been intensively discussed for decades and various powerful examples, mainly from inquisitorial records, have been cited to illuminate this issue. However, the focus on individual cases necessarily leaves the larger questions unresolved. We lack entirely the big picture of women’s actual involvement, and have no idea whether it was any different from that of men. Quantitative studies remain extremely scarce, and they rely on counting numbers of women (and men) or instances of preaching by women (and men). Social network analysis seems to be an extremely relevant approach capable of revealing the social microstructure of medieval dissident Christianity’s networks, and shedding new light on this issue. The global question in this paper is whether there is any significant difference among the roles played by men and women as approximated by various network measures. The data is three large sets of inquisitorial records (ca. 1000-1500 nodes in each network) from Languedoc in 1270s-1320s when this area was an important laboratory of the early inquisition. The paper explores the possibilities and limits of social network analysis of data from inquisitorial records, automatically extracted from indices of personal names, and evaluates the validity of this method against a smaller sample of manually coded data. |
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