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2. To Correct the Guilty Life: Representation and Knowledge
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2 To Correct the Guilty Life Representation andKnowledge The Context ofa Discourse ThE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE HAD ENDED in 1229, and with the cessation of armed conflict, a new kind of battle against heresy within Languedoc could begin. In the following two decades, inquisitors would question, record, and assign penance to thousands ofpeople. Between 1245 and 1249, just two ofthe several inquisitors-Bernard de Caux and Jean de St. Pierre- interrogated over six thousand individuals. Their investigation was concentrated on the Lauragais, the region between Toulouse and Carcassonne. Whole villages and parishes were brought to Toulouse for questioning, and the inquisitors aimed to examine every single male over the age of fourteen, and every female over twelve.1 Around 1248, this pair of Dominicans put down in writing some thoughts about the task ofinquisition and certain tools they thought useful for its practice. The text they created-the Ordo processus Narbonensis-was the first inquisition manual.2 As James Given has noted, the production ofmanuals for inquisitors can be placed within the context of a general enthusiasm for "how-to" manuals during the thirteenth century, most notably the manuals for preachers and the manuals for confessors.3 However, the Processus is somewhat shamed by the comparison: it is a very short text (about seventeen hundred words in Latin), and consists of a letter of commission, a brief description of procedure, a question list for interrogations, a few formulae for citations, abjurations, and the imposition ofpenances and punishments, and an example of a penitential letter. Although it marks the increasing professionalisation ofinquisition, the Processus has nothing of the breadth of, say, Robert of Flamborough's early penitential manual, the Liberpoenitentialis, composed in the first decade ofthe To Correct the Guilty Life 49 thirteenth century.4 As one might expect from a procedure that had appeared from a conglomeration ofexisting juridical and religious ideas, there is almost a sense, with the Processus, that the inquisitors were beginning to discover the need for an abstract statement oftheir task. To be sure, the questions asked by these first inquisitors were simple, tailored no doubt for the limited faculties ofthe illitterati they were to interrogate ; but perhaps within those crude questions they found other speech, other ideas, and hence further challenges. The Processus ends with a curious admission : "We do various others things, indeed, in procedure and in other matters, which cannot easily be reduced to writing, holding in all things to the letter of the law or to specific apostolic ordinances.''5 Might we be permitted to sense a hint of nervousness in this confession of textual limitation, in the hurried reassurance that whatever these "things" are, they nonetheless follow the "letter ofthe law''? There are, perhaps, revealed here the limits ofa simple textual mechanism confronted by speech and practice that exceed its rudimentary discourse. This is alot to read into one oblique comment; but ifwe can project backwards from what inquisition would become, we can best understand its trajectory as pushed forward by the momentum gained in both demanding, and then negotiating, an excess of speech. With this one phrase, the Processus points to the motive force behind later changes to inquisition, and its construction of the position of the deponent. The inquisitors were caught in an unrecognized quandary: on the one hand, they carriedwith them the previous discourses surrounding heresy and the laity-in particular, the apprehension of the laity as illitterati, lacking interior reflective selves. This drove the discourse of inquisition to construct deponents as objects of knowledge, identifiable and classifiable within the burgeoning system of classification. On the other hand, however, the demands intrinsic to inquisition for the production ofspeech- and for speech positioned as authoritative through issuingfrom an autonomous, interiorized confessant- pushed inquisitorial discourse into the construction of speaking subjects. This tension between the construction of objects ofknowledge and subjects within knowledge might be described as the internal (and unintended) momentum to inquisitorial discourse. For ifthe authors ofthe Processus were unable to specify the more abstract qualities of their task, later writers attempted to fill in the gaps. Over the next century various manuals and accompanying works were produced.6 For my purposes, three are of particular interest: the Doctrina de modo procedendi contra hereticos (probably composed between 1278 and 1298), the De inquisition & hereticorum formerly attributed to David of Augsburg (probably late [3.147.104.248] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 19:52 GMT) so Chapter2 thirteenth century), and Bernard Gui's Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (written c. 1323...