The Old Palace, York Minster
9th April – 8th May

A collaboration between the Doat Project and York Minster Library, Inquisition Retold is an exhibition about the making and remaking of inquisition through text, using material held in the library’s collection.

In part the exhibition showcases the project itself. The production of inquisition registers, the copying of these by Jean de Doat’s project in the seventeenth century, the modern edition and study of these texts, all contribute to the story of inquisition and the ways in which we tell it.

The exhibition also showcases the general history of the inquisition. The story usually begins with foundation in the early 1230s by Gregory IX (in fact the pope was transferring the job of dealing with heresy from bishops to mendicant friars, especially the Dominicans), and it continues with the rise of the Spanish inquisition in the later 15th century, and the mythologizing of inquisition in popular culture.

While re-telling an often told story, and doing this mainly through texts, the exhibition uses two intertwined threads: two persons the visitor to the exhibition can follow, the Dominican Bernard Gui (1261/62-1331) and a woman from Toulouse interrogated and eventually executed for heresy.

The most famous of all medieval inquisitors, Gui wrote a treatise on the Practice of Inquisition. Although the records of his interrogations do not survive, a manuscript containing his sentences does. A collaboration between the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) and the Dutch Remonstrant theologian Philipp van Limborch (1633-1712) brought the manuscript of these sentences to publication in 1692, as a massive appendix to Limborch’s History of the Inquisition.

In Limborch’s edition there is Gui’s sentence of condemnation on Philippa Maurel. Her earlier involvement in heresy is alluded to in a deposition copied in a Doat manuscript, and her earlier interrogation was edited from this Doat manuscript in 2011.

Bernard Gui’s image is widely diffused in modern culture. His Practice of Inquisition was ironically plagiarised in Umberto Eco’s novel Name of the Rose and in the subsequent film adaptation he was scripted and acted by F. Murray Abraham as a figure of terrifying power and cruelty.

Telling the story through texts, the exhibition is also making a point. While the most obvious manipulation of reality is to be found in the images of inquisition put over in polemical religious histories, gothic novels and modern popular culture, it is not confined to these. Thoughts and actions were inserted into theological and legal categories of heresy, in a long line of texts proceeding from the generalities of canon law via interrogations to the final sentence on Philippa Maurel: this was also a process through which reality was coloured and shaped.