Andrew P. Roach

The Medieval inquisition: scale-free networks and the suppression of heresy

Qualitative evidence suggests that heresy within the medieval Church had many of the characteristics of a scale-free network. From the perspective of the Church, heresy can be seen as an infectious disease. The disease persisted for long periods of time, breaking out again even when the Church believed it to have been eradicated. A principal mechanism of heresy was through a small number of individuals with very large numbers of social contacts.

Penance and the making of the inquisition in Languedoc

This article deals with the practice and theory of penances imposed on heretics by inquisitors in southern France before 1250. At first inquisitors offered a simple choice between penance as proof of conversion or death by burning. Lay resistance forced a subtler approach whereby penitents were removed from the local community in order to be gradually reintegrated into the wider Catholic one. The construction of prisons and the imposition of crosses helped turn inquisitors into an institution. From being a means to the destruction of organised heresy, they became a permanent police force of doctrinal orthodoxy.

Teaching Medieval Towns:: Group Exercises, Individual Presentations and Self-Assessment.

This paper examines the use of innovative collaborative small group activities within a Medieval History Honours course. Drawing on student evaluations and feedback from a focus group, it reflects upon the use of group exercises in history (as opposed to the more traditional individual ones) that involve the construction of three-dimensional models of medieval towns, the reconstruction of town history from visual as well as text based sources, and the use of self-assessment within a subject where tutor-assessment tends to be the norm. We conclude that such methods are clearly of benefit to the students, but recommend that to ensure the effectiveness of such a programme, methodological issues are addressed directly with them.