As he sits in his small office in Edmund Casey Hall surrounded by boxes of tea and hundreds of books, it’s easy to say Robin Vose resembles a medieval monk who spends his days sipping hot tea while unveiling the origins of modern totalitarianism.
The STU history professor received an $82,000 research grant and plans to spend the next four years getting a better understanding of some 700-year-old inquisition manuals.
“I’m just tracking how these interreligious understandings change over time as you see them in the inquisition manuals.”
These medieval manuals explain things like how to carry out the questioning and arrest of heretics, how to conduct torture, under what circumstances what evidence is admissible and whether the accused can have defense lawyers.
Vose said the easiest way to get through the manuals is to choose a consistent theme and stick with it. He chose to take a closer look at Islam.
“The category I want to start with is Islam and how they [at that time] understood Islam. So I will look at how it’s portrayed in each of these different manuals. I’ll do the same for witches the same for gypsies. They come up in some of the later ones.”
He will then take a look at how religion in general was treated in the medieval period.
“This is the kind of thing I can do with this project, look at what these manuals tell us about how people understood religion in the past and how they wanted to persecute these religions.”
Vose’s interest in religious history was sparked while travelling through Ecuador, Israel, Egypt and the former Yugoslavia in the 90s.
“I was especially interested in what was going on in Spain where these people are preaching to and sometimes inquisiting Jews and Muslims.”
The main project for the medieval historian is translating the earliest major manual of Bernard Gui, Practica. Gui, a 13th century French Dominican monk and inquisitor, is one of the most accomplished writers of the late medieval period.
“It’s in five parts and only one of the parts has ever been translated – the sexy part which describes the heretics.”
Vose’s translation approach may also seem a little medieval to some. Writing it out long-hand may seem tedious, but he finds it relaxing.
“It’s a meditative exercise that really helps me to internalize the inquisition texts a lot better,” said Vose. “I think it’s really important to read it as a whole instead of just reading the selected fun bits, so I’m trying to get a grasp on how the manual works as a whole.”
