Publications

Abstract:

The article presents a revised dating of a major late medieval inquisition of heresy, challenging the dating of the records established since the 1880s. The inquisitor Petrus Zwicker’s proceedings against Brandenburgian and Pomeranian Waldensians in Stettin did not take place between November 1392 and March 1394, with an 11-month pause between March 1393 and February 1394, as has been the scholarly consensus up till now. Instead, the prosecution was a continuous process that started in November 1393 and lasted till late March 1394. The article discusses the problems of the established dating that is based on now-outdated information about the inquisitor’s itinerary and an ambiguous 15th-century commentary on the register volume. The internal evidence of the register, such as the way different deponents refer to the same events, strongly points towards an uninterrupted process. The revised timeline for the inquisitions solves several contradictions in interpreting the records and proposes new lines of inquiry. A novel reconstruction of the last Waldensian minister’s visit to Stettin and surroundings is provided in the last section of the article. In general, the article addresses the constant need to re-evaluate established interpretations of premodern sources, including those uncontested in the scholarship.

 

  • Välimäki, Reima, & Aho, Marius. “Was It Augustine After All? Patristic Sources of Medieval Anti-heretical Polemics from the Perspective of Text Reuse Analysis”. I Quaderni Del m.æ.S. – Journal of Mediæ Ætatis Sodalicium, 22(1s), 2024, 67–122. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2533-2325/19116

Abstract:
The article explores the extent to which medieval polemical authors resorted to patristic originals and how much they adopted patristic argumentation. The authors used computational text reuse analysis using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to compare 189 classical and medieval texts, mainly from open repositories of digitized texts, to find similarities. The corpus includes classical works, particularly Augustine’s anti-heretical treatises, canon law, inquisition manuals, exempla collections and florilegia, sermons, and theological commentaries. The lack of medieval texts after ca. 1200 in machine-readable format is the greatest hindrance to building a representative medieval corpus. The authors propose that although medieval polemicists saw Augustine and other Church fathers as models of Christian champions fighting heresy, intensive engagement with patristic theology took place in medieval works with limited circulation and influence.