Katia Riccardo defended her thesis and is a Phd

Congratulations! Please find attached the abstract of the thesis and a link to the text.

This dissertation investigates the register of the inquisition of heresy in Bologna between 1291 and 1310, with the aim of reassessing both the internal dynamics of these documents and their significance for the study of medieval religious dissent. Produced at a moment when the repression of heterodoxy was becoming increasingly systematized, the register constitutes one of the most extensive surviving records of inquisitorial activity in medieval Italy. Its folios encompass interrogations, confessions, sentences and other documents that illuminate not only the investigatory practices of inquisitors, but also the voices, networks, and lived realities of dissident lay believers and supporters. The register primarily concerns two dissident religious cultures documented in north-central Italy at the turn of the fourteenth century: the Cathars, identifiable above all by their initiation rite of the consolamentum and by dualist cosmological convictions that attributed the creation of the material world to an evil force, and the Apostles, a radical lay movement inspired by Gerard Segarelli and carried forward by Dolcino of Novara. Alongside them, the documents record more isolated cases of other heterodox attitudes as well as a record of an extensive anti-inquisitorial unrest. The studies gathered in this dissertation approach the register from complementary quantitative perspectives, combining methods from socio-economic history, network analysis, and computational text analysis. Each study isolates a distinct dimension of the register – its records of punishments and confiscations, its testimony of incriminations and social ties, and its inquisitorial language, thereby reframing our understanding of both religious dissent and its repression in Bologna around 1300. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that the Bologna register is not merely a repository of individual depositions, but a complex source shaped by judicial practice. Its documents show how dissent was articulated through networks of kinship, neighborhood, and support, and how repression was not simply recorded but produced through the co-production of documents by inquisitors and notaries. More broadly, the dissertation contributes to the historiography of medieval religious dissent by combining computational methods with traditional historical inquiry, offering new methodological pathways for addressing empirical questions raised by inquisition records.