Heresy quantified: Structured data in the study of medieval religious dissidence

As part of his application for full professorship in History, Dr. David Zbíral (Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts) will give a public lecture where he will present his recent work within the ERC-funded "Dissident Networks Project" on a quantitative but deeply source-oriented study of dissidence in medieval inquisition records. He will show how transformation of sources into structured data not only provides an unprecedented level of precision hard to attain with close reading alone, but also guides imagination around historical phenomena, and helps decide controversial questions in scholarship on medieval heresy.