Publication details
Modeling Medieval Incrimination Networks: Quasi-States, Events or Hyperevents?
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Inquisitions were established by the Catholic Church in the 13th century to systematically investigate and suppress religious dissent through formal trial procedures. These trials were led by papally appointed inquisitors and documented by notaries, working to gather incriminating evidence against individuals through testimonies. Extant inquisition registers allow us to extract historical incrimination networks, but also raise methodological questions about their optimal representation and analysis. Given the virtual irrevocability of incriminations, we can conceptualize them as quasi-states and use Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to study the long-term aggregated characteristics of incriminations. However, the ERGM model needs to be adapted to account for the inquisitors' practice of summoning individuals. We can conceptualize incriminations as dyadic events and apply Dynamic Network Actor Models (DyNAM) to focus on individual decision-making patterns. However, as one deponent could incriminate multiple others, Relational Hyperevent Models (RHEM) might be more appropriate as they account for the polyadic nature of incriminations. In this talk, we compare these three approaches by applying them to incrimination networks extracted from multiple medieval inquisition registers. |
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