11 - The seventeenth-century introductions to medieval inquisition records in Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection Doat Mss 21–26

Summary

Between 1665 and 1670, Jean de Doat, Président of the Chambre des Comptes of the Parlement of Pau, was commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, to copy documents held in various archives in Languedoc, ‘for the conservation of the rights of our crown and to serve history’ (pour la conservation des droicts de nostre couronne et pour servir à l’histoire). These fill 258 large volumes, now preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris as ‘Collection Languedoc Doat’. Among the materials selected for copying were a number of thirteenth-century inquisition documents, mostly depositions, produced in Toulouse and Carcassonne, the two main centres of inquisition in Languedoc, which now occupy volumes 21–26 in this collection. All the original documents are now lost, which makes their survival in the Doat collection doubly precious.

The documents copied are of very uneven length, from the giant volume ‘FFF’ from the Inquisition archives in Carcassonne, whose original contained 247 pages, and which now occupies Doat 23 and significant portions of Doat 22 and Doat 24, to the smaller inquisitions and collections of sentences found in Doat 21. Some appear to have been copied in their entirety – others are extracts. Some of the material in Doat 21, for example, comes from a register from which extracts have also been copied into other volumes.

Doat 21 contains a wide variety of material – short inquisitions, collections of sentences, safe-conducts and other documents. The remaining five volumes contain depositions before various inquisitors. The large volume FFF from Carcassonne, containing the inquisitions of Ferrier and his colleagues, as has been said, occupies Doat 22 from fol. 107r, Doat 23 and Doat 24 to fol. 238r. These date from the 1230s and 40s. At the beginning of Doat 22 is a collection of roughly contemporary depositions before the inquisitors Bernard of Caux and John of Saint-Pierre, taken from a composite volume in the archives of the Dominicans of Toulouse; the remainder of Doat 24, from fol. 239r, contains a collection of depositions from Pamiers in front of the same inquisitors. The depositions in Doat 25 and 26 are from the later thirteenth century: in Doat 25 and folios 1r–78v of Doat 26 are depositions from Toulouse before Ranulph of Plassac, Pons of Parnac and their colleagues; from fol.