Dr. David Zbíral (Department for the Study of Religions, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University) has been awarded the prestigious Czech Science Foundation EXPRO (Projects of Excellence) grant for a five-year (2019-2023) research project Dissident Religious Cultures in Medieval Europe from the Perspective of Social Network Analysis and Geographic Information Systems (DISSINET). With a team of other four researchers, he will be exploring the use of network analytical and GIS methods in research into dissident religious communities of the Christian Middle Ages, which will lead to developing an innovative methodological framework for their study as well as to significant new findings on the geography and social microstructure of medieval dissident networks. The DISSINET project is one of only eight EXPRO projects supported in 2018 in the whole area of the humanities and the social sciences.
DISSINET has developed an interactive map of the occupations, dissident religious affiliations, and locations of residence of nearly 900 persons suspected of heresy in the inquisition register of Bologna, 1291–1310.
Building upon the invaluable work of modern editors, the DISSINET project is building a textual corpus of medieval inquisitorial material, which now contains 15 registers, totals over 1.6 million tokens, and ranges from North-Central Italy through Languedoc to England, and from the 1230s until the 1520s.
