Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century

As indicated by its subtitle, this study approaches inquisition in the fourteenth century primarily through two great inquisitorial manuals: Gui’s Practica inquisitionis (1325) and Eymerich’s Directorium inquisitorum (1376). At points, Hill also references the anonymous De officio inquisitionis and the Italian jurist Zanchino Ugolini's Tractatus super materia hereticorum, as well as other kinds of inquisitorial records. While he acknowledges the limitations of approaching inquisition through such inevitably proscriptive texts, he is more concerned with the evolving concept of inquisition, rather than its actual operations, so this proves less of a dilemma than it might otherwise be. Another complication is the fact that Hill, quite rightly, presents both the Practica and Directorium as emerging from the particular contexts of inquisition in Languedoc and Aragon, respectively, which certainly affects how far they can be taken as statements about “inquisition” as an abstraction. He mitigates this problem quite effectively, however, by arguing that the Practica, despite its particularities, was an essentially conservative work that largely recapitulated inquisitorial norms established in Languedoc in the thirteenth century (he is careful to note that Italy represented a quite different inquisitorial scene). For the Directorium, his argument is that Eymerich was a daring innovator, even a radical, very much driven by his own concerns and the situation in the Crown of Aragon, but that already by the fifteenth century, and certainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth, his conceptualization of inquisition became normative, at least within the Dominican order.

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