1 - STORIES, AND HOW TO READ THEM

Summary

HERITAGE

It might seem naive, perhaps superficial, to suggest that a historian's first response to primary sources should be fascination and curiosity. If we are talking about heresy and inquisition, that curiosity drives us to get hold of words, dialogues, in an ultimate effort to salvage fragments of those lives that are so quickly forgotten, so easily moulded into statistics and theories, so often just used as a means to substantiate our statements. Yet names and stories are not enough: inquisition trials remain perhaps one of the few types of sources which allow us to hear people's voices.

This discussion builds upon developments in source criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, following a period of relative lack of interest in this topic with regard to inquisitorial texts, there has recently been an increase in historians’ attention to the application of these methods, in the wake of the development of postmodernist theories of language and power. Some attention needs to be given to methodological approaches, their relevance and effectiveness, and distinctions need to be drawn between them.

Suggestions coming from historians such as Grundmann, Lerner, Ginzburg and Merlo, now considered as ‘classics’, were developed because they were confronting very different and peculiar texts, and unusual difficulties.