Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc

INQUISITION AND MEDIEVAL SOCIETY: POWER, DISCIPLINE,
AND RESISTANCE IN LANGUEDOG

INTRODUCTION
FEW SUBJECTS OF medieval history arouse as much passion as the
inquisition of heretical depravity. Polemicists, propagandists, novelists
and historians-amateur and professional- have all tried their hands at
this topic. For several centuries monographs, treatises, diatribes, and apologies
have spilled from the presses. The 1983 edition of Vekené's Bibliotheca
bibliographica historiae Sanctae Inquisitionis, the fundamental guide to the literature of
all the inquisition, both medieval and carly modern, lists 4,808 titles.gr
The fascination of the subject for writers of all stripes has itself become the subject of
scholarly study. Edward Peters's show more Inquisition (1988) brilliantly outlines the ways in
which the history of the inquisition has been created, reshaped, reinvented, falsified,
and mythologized by generations of writers pursuing agendas that have
ranged from the scientific to the romantic and from the scholarly to the perverse
Given this abundance, the reader might well wonder what could justify yet
another work on the inquisition of the Middle Ages, especially one that restricts
itself to the region of southern France known as Languedoc. My justification for
returning to such an oft-studied subject is that it gives us an unusual opportuni-
ty to construct a case study of the sociology of medieval politics.

A CASE STUDY OF THE EXERCISE
OF MEDIEVAL POLITICAL POWER

Among the most important aspects of European history in the late Middle
Ages and the early modern period was the progressive elaboration of ever more
powerful political organizations and the development of more coherent, intru
sive, and coercive forms of governance. These phenomena have often been
discussed. Library shelves contain an imposing array of books devoted to the
histories of the proto-states of medieval Europe, to their administrative and
financial histories, and to the legal-juridical apparatuses they devised to justify
and rationalize their authority.

Yet much of this scholarship has a strangely bloodless feel to it. We know a
great deal about the ways in which medieval rulers and administrators organized
themselves, kept their records, and justified their authority to one another and to
their subjects. However, our picture of the actual process of governance in this
critical period when the first lineaments of European states were being hammered show less