Jean-Paul Rehr
I am a post-graduate student at Université Lyon 2/Ciham with a research specialization in the formative first decades of the inquisition into heresy (early-mid 13th century), in particular in south-west France. Before returning to university I was an operations and technology executive, a perspective I bring to my current research.
I am currently transcribing, editing and translating MS 609 of the Bibliothéque de la Municipalité de Toulouse. MS 609 contains two volumes of depositions made and sworn before inquisitors between the summers of 1245 and 1246. The inquisition was lead by Bernard de Caux and Jean de Saint-Peire, brothers of the Order of Preachers, and they oversaw the deposing of more than 5500 people over the course of those twelve months. Those people – lords, minor nobility, townspeople, peasants – came by foot or by horse from over 100 villages and parishes across the Lauragais, the verdant lands between Toulouse and Carcassonne, to the cloister of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse.
My edition (in progress) has thus far been built on an SQL-based content management system (CMS). This version allows significant querying and datamining of the manuscript’s 5500+ deponents, 100+ villages, 15000+ reference people, with memories and events going back to the 1180s.
The DEMM project is an experiment in re-encoding the edition within a TEI technology framework. The objectives of the test are to mirror the interactivity and inter-linking of my current CMS-based edition while taking advantage of the TEI-specific apparatuses. The test uses a handful of inter-related testimonies from the village of Saint Martin Lalande, however the Latin versions are now presented in both a facsimile edition and an interpretive edition, as well as an English translation. The reader can thus follow people and their lives across the registry while at the same time exploring the inquisitors’ and notaries’ work habits.