Research Associate Delfina I. Nieto-Isabel on ‘Networks of Defiance’

Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel is Visiting Lecturer on Women’s Studies and Religion and Society and a 2021-22 Research Associate at the HDS Women’s Studies in Religion Program. She is teaching the spring 2022 course, "Voices of Dissent: Heresy and Gender in the Middle Ages.”

Delfi is an associate researcher at the Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures (IRCVM) at the University of Barcelona. She has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission to carry out her research project on the impact of illiterate women on religious radicalization at Queen Mary University of London.

Below, Delfi talks about her year-long project at the WSRP, “Networks of Defiance: Women and Heretical Conversion in the Late Middle Ages.”

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I use records of trials against suspects of heresy in thirteenth and fourteenth century Southern France and Northern Iberia, and written mostly in Latin. These include the depositions and testimonies of thousands of men and women who were summoned before inquisitorial courts under charges of heresy and forced to testify against themselves and others, but also the sentences that were pronounced against them. Many were burned at the stake and many more were sentenced to life imprisonment. Many were sentenced to wear badges that marked them as convicted heretics, to go on forced pilgrimages that took them far from home, or to have their properties destroyed.

Networks are a way of understanding complex systems that focuses on two main elements: actors and relations. In my networks, the actors are the men and women who were prosecuted for their involvement in non-sanctioned religious movements, and the relations encompass the wide variety of connections established between them.

This includes anything from kinship to friendship, simple acquaintanceship to sharing information, teaching, sheltering fugitives, providing someone with food and/or money, or engaging in the traffic of forbidden books or even forbidden relics. I read the sources and extract from them the names of the actors along with every piece of information I can glean, either directly or indirectly, that tells me more about these actors and the myriad of ways in which they were connected to each other.

I code and classify the data so that I can use it quantitatively, then I perform an analysis that results, among other things, in a lot of information about the structure of these networks, the positions of the different individuals within them, the different ways in which they could be central to the whole thing or the existence of overlooked connections. This analysis is quantitative in the sense that it relies on good old maths (I was a physicist before I became a historian of religion), but it is also qualitative, as I need to understand the context and the process that led to the production of the sources themselves to make sense of the whole thing.

There are many important lessons we can learn from this part of our past. For starters, it teaches us that religious truth, no matter how seemingly well established, has never been a matter of absolutes. Every single one of these movements considered themselves righteous and entrusted with a worthy, holy mission, and the same can be said about the Church that persecuted them.

Tolerance is key. The more they were persecuted, the more radicalized they became, until bridging the gap was completely impossible. It also confirms what scholars of religion have known for a while, which is that religion is not only and not always about theology and intellectual contributions.

Religious dissent in the Middle Ages is a prime example of how religious experiences are porous and draw from many sources and influences. For many medieval people it was perfectly fine to combine different sets of beliefs and practices that we would today ascribe to clearly distinct denominations. That's the other lesson that we need to understand: Making religion about theology ends up being dismissive of the contribution of the non-elites who didn't (and still don't) have a say in hierarchical power structures. In the Middle Ages, and sadly today in many contexts, that is incredibly damaging to our ability to gauge the role of women.

I remember my shock the first time my research showed me that sacerdotal elites were not necessary for persecuted religious movements to survive. It was a shock because for years most of the debate focused on the level of organization of these “heretical” elites, and suddenly my networks were clearly pointing at a bias in the sources that has impaired our ability to see beyond these individuals.

This narrative focused on leadership also involves women. The importance of their participation in religious dissent, or lack thereof, has been predicated on their presence within these elites. I do understand that it is an important factor we need to consider, but what I'm most proud about is that my work shows that non-elite women could be just as central for a dissident network.

We, scholars of religious dissent, feel drawn to tell the stories of those who were marked as different, who held no power and still were brave enough to resist; that is why I find it especially important to be careful and avoid focusing too much on 'heretical leaders' who, to all intents and purposes, were the ones allegedly in power within these networks.

Our sources are partial and were the result of interrogations conducted under duress, but that is something any scholar who works with inquisitorial records has faced. For me, the greatest challenge has been combining qualitative and quantitative research to study historical religious movements. In 2012, when I started applying the network approach to analyze inquisitorial sources, there was no one else doing it at that scale, and to many it sounded far-fetched. It was a struggle to find my place and the narrative that made sense of the results I had in front of me.

As for my personal motivation, I'm a first-generation scholar, my grandparents were migrants who were never part of any kind of elite but managed to survived the Spanish Civil War and a 40-year fascist dictatorship that held fast in the heart of Europe while the Western world was looking the other way.

They were strong, resilient people whose contribution has never been acknowledged, and yet, they made it possible for me to get where I am today. I feel like I'm speaking for them when I look at these incredibly strong women whose voices have been forgotten.

Interview conducted and edited by Madeline Bugeau-Heartt