Tracking the development of derogatory connotations in hate speech against Christian non-conformism in 11th- to12th-century Europe through hypergraphs
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | ZBÍRAL, David, Zoltán BRYS and Lidia-Ernestyna HINZ-WIECZOREK. Tracking the development of derogatory connotations in hate speech against Christian non-conformism in 11th- to12th-century Europe through hypergraphs. In Sunbelt 2024: Networks and Resilience, 24-30 June 2024, Edinburgh, UK. 2024. |
| Description | Shortly after the year 1000, after several centuries of silence, heresy again became a political topic in Western Christendom. At that time, no institutionalised processes were in place to deal with religious non-conformism, but various deprecatory concepts and metaphors were circulating that sensitised churchmen and parishioners to dissidence and legitimised its repression before the intense anti-heretical legislation in the 2nd half of the 12th century, ultimately culminating in the establishment of inquisition in 1231. In this paper, we analyse a manually collected dataset of ca. 350 derogatory attributions from about 40 writings about specific cases of heresy in the West in 1000–1150 in order to evaluate changes in medieval anti-heretical hate propaganda in this crucial period of the “formation of the persecuting society” in Europe (Robert I. Moore). Through independent double coding, we assigned individual derogatory attributions to 15 more general categories – connotations (e.g. “immorality”, “enemy”, “disease”). We then projected this data as hypergraphs, where nodes are the connotation and hyperedges represent the co-occurrence of connotations in a text. We then used the sliding temporal window approach to track the development of centralities of all connotations over time. We found that during the studied period, some tangible threat connotations have come to the foreground, while some more abstract or theological declined. |
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