Sitting on the shelves in the French national library in Paris are 258 grand volumes, which were were originally bound in red morocco and bore the arms of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance from 1665 to 1683. Page after page, inside them, you see very large hand-writing: imagine only 300 words written out on a sheet of A3. The hand looks not unlike the copperplate style used by our Victorian great-great-grandparents in their painstakingly clear personal letters, only larger and more twirly. It is in this hand, copied out in these volumes, that many of our inquisition registers survive. So, what were these volumes, and how did they come about?

In the library these volumes have a title, ‘Collection Doat’, which preserves the name of the energetic official who was in charge of the copying. Jean de Doat (c.1600-1683) was a lawyer’s son, President of the Chambre des Comptes of the Parlement of Pau from 1646, and in 1663 he bought the lordship of Doat. Between 1663 and 1670 he was in charge of a great enterprise working in southern France, in the language of the royal commission, ‘for the conservation of our crown rights and to serve history’. The money came from Colbert, through Colbert’s librarian, Pierre de Carcavy, and Doat had to report back to Carcavy how he spent it. Doat employed a team of scribes. He would go into an archive, select the material to be copied, which would be taken off and returned after the transcription. The transcriptions were despatched to Paris, bound, and became prestige objects in Colbert’s library. Glimpses of the everyday reality of the work can be snatched through Doat’s surviving letters to Carcavy: the lighting in the rooms where copying went on, summer heat, the names of individual scribes and their levels of pay, and Doat’s complaints about their drunkenness, debauchery, and proneness to error. Like anyone reporting on his mission, of course, Doat was interested in blaming subordinates and complaining about them, and trying to justify spending more money. Eventually the Doat commission died the death of all such enterprises: the money ran out.

Part of the purpose of Doat’s commission was ‘to serve history’, and it was not a one-off, but rather part of a great wave during these years of monumental enterprises in antiquarian, editorial and historical scholarship. For example, another of Colbert’s librarians, Étienne Baluze (1630-1718), was publishing texts, and two ‘Maurists’ – Benedictine monks from the congregation of St Maur called Luc d’Achery (1609-1685) and Jean Mabillon (1632-1707) - were laying the foundations of the great series investigating and publishing lives of the saints called Acta Sanctorum: their first volume appeared in 1668. And Charles du Fresne du Cange (1610-1688) was engaged in the research for his great dictionary of medieval Latin, whose first edition appeared in 1678.

What of its scholarly standards? All scribes make errors. The Doat volumes show that the Doat scribes were not exceptions, and if we believe Doat some will have been copying while suffering from lack of sleep or hangovers. But the erasures and corrections that were made, the employment of correctors and Doat’s own complaints about errors constitute double-edged evidence: of inevitable human error and of the concern to remove error.

Although ultimate assessment is impossible where, as in so many cases, only the Doat copy survives, there can be control when a medieval manuscript survives. An example is the fascinating text Interrogatio Iohannis, a text purporting to report a dialogue between Christ and John which was brought from Bulgaria to Italian heretics and was also in the hands of heretics in Languedoc. There still survive (a) a medieval manuscript, produced probably in northern Italy and now kept in the national library in Vienna, and (b) the copy made in the 1660s by the Doat scribes from a now lost manuscript which had been in the archive kept by Dominican inquisitors in Carcassonne. There are small variations that are the preoccupation of a technical edition. But for us the bigger fact is significant: the survival of essentially the same text in Doat as one among many indications that what we are confronted with in the Doat volumes is a collection of essentially solid materials.

Doat visited two Dominican archives, selecting three inquisition registers to copy in Toulouse and a larger number in Carcassonne. The transcriptions mainly went into the volumes now numbered Doat 21-36. One Toulouse register, containing later thirteenth-century depositions and copied into Doat no 25 and part of Doat 26, was published in Inquisition and Heretics in Thirteenth-Century Languedoc: Edition and Translation of Toulouse Inquisition Depositions, 1273-1282, ed. P. Biller, C. Bruschi and S. Sneddon. The current project – ‘The Genesis of Inquisition Procedures and the Truth-Claims of Inquisition Records’ – has turned to the earlier registers contained in parts of Doat 21 and all of Doat 22-24, which it is editing, translating and studying.