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Rethinking History: The

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The Historian as Inquisitor:

The ethics of interrogating
subaltern voices
a
John H. Arnold
a
School of History, University of East Anglia ,
Published online: 31 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: John H. Arnold (1998) The Historian as Inquisitor: The ethics
of interrogating subaltern voices, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and
Practice, 2:3, 379-386, DOI: 10.1080/13642529809408974

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642529809408974

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 The Historian as Inquisitor
The ethics of interrogating subaltern voices

JohnH. Arnold
School of History, University of East Anglia
We command you to cite a t once, and immediately, Beatrice, widow of Otho de
Lagleize .. .
to appear in person next Saturday before us in our Seat a t Pamiers,
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to respond to certain allegations concerning the Catholic faith.

(Duvernoy 1965:216)

Escoutez. In medieval Languedoc, there lived a woman called Beatrice de

Planissoles, daughter of the knight Philippe de Planissoles. She married two
men, and loved or was loved by three more. Her first husband, Berengar de
Roquefort, was chltelain of the village of Montaillou, high in the Pyrenean
mountains. Berengar’s steward, Raymond, tried to’woo Beatrice, asking her
to run away with him to Lombardy to join the Cathar heretics there. BCatrice
refused Raymond’s solicitations, and when he entered her bed uninvited one
night, she threw him out. Beatrice was later raped by a man called Pathau
Clergue, and when Berengar died in the same year, Pathau ‘held her publicly’
as his mistress. Not long after, however, she was seduced by Pathau’s cousin,
Pierre Clergue, the parish priest of Montaillou. With Pierre she enjoyed some
sexual adventures, most notably having sex in the parish church itself. Two
years later she left him, and the mountains, for the lowlands of Crampagna,
to marry Otho de Lagleize. Despite falling gravely ill in 1308, Beatrice out-
lived her second husband too. In 1316 she fell in love with a young priest,
Barthilemy Amilhac, who ran a class which her daughters attended.
Barthelemy and Beatrice then began a new life in the town of Lladros, in Cat-
alonia, where local custom accepted a priest living with a woman; in fact, a
local notary drew up a contract that married them in all but name. But this
happiness did not last: Beatrice was cited for questioning by the inquisitor
Bishop Jacques Fournier on the crime of heresy. Beatrice was questioned once,
then ran away, back to Barthilemy, but Barthelemy offered no support. After
one final night together, he abandoned her, weeping, on the road to Mas-
Saintes-Puelles. And there she was captured, and brought before Fournier
once again. Confessing to what she knew about Catharism (which was very
little) she was imprisoned, along with Barthelemy, in 1321. In 1322 she was
released, on the proviso that she wear the yellow crosses of infamy that
marked her out as a penitent for crimes of heresy. And that is all I know of
her.
I begin with this story - and present it as a story - because what I have to
say here concerns the desire to narrate, to tell again. Beatrice’s story is fasci-
nating; it is also relatively well known, for it appears in fragmented form in

Rethinking History 2 3 (1998), pp. 379-386 0 Routledge 1998 1364-2529

 380 John H. Arnold

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s best seller Moiztnillori (Le Roy Ladurie 1980:
159-68, 172-5 and passim). Sections of her deposition are found translated
in various collections (Duvernoy 1978, Vol. 1: 260-90), and she even
appeared in an Occitan opera.’ Why is she so popular? In part because of the
detail of her story, and in particular its sexual detail. But beyond that is the
matter of how her evidence reaches us, and the kind of authority it is assumed
to carry.
We know about Beatrice because of the bishop Jacques Fournier (later
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Pope Benedict XII), whose letter of citation is quoted at the head of this
article; or rather, we know about Biatrice in a specific way, because of the
process that Fournier carried out. That process, repeated and refined over the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Languedoc and elsewhere, was the
process of inquisition. The witness, whether cited, brought from prison or
appearing ‘spontaneously’, was asked a series of questions by the inquisitor
in their native language, and their answers recorded in Latin by a scribe. This
transcript was rewritten, still in Latin, into a past-tense, third-person narra-
tive account of the confession. This was, in turn, read back to the deponent
in the vernacular, for them to verify its truth and accuracy, and to give them
the opportunity to confess further should they be so inspired. Most of the
people caught up in the inquisitorial process in the Middle Ages were from
the lower echelons of society; Biatrice, as a member of the lower nobility, is
one of the most elevated deponents in the records. Many presentations of
these sources have stressed the way they give us access to the subaltern - their
own words, as they themselves had to verify to the inquisitorial scribe. When
Jean Duvernoy translated the Fournier records into modern French, he
rewrote the deponents’ speech into the first person, and used a typographical
layout which minimized the inquisitorial apparatus. This pattern has been fol-
lowed by English translators, and on occasion by other historians quoting
witnesses from the records. It can be taken to indicate that we are dealing not
only with the voices of ‘real people’ from history, but voices which allow us
a particularly intimate connection to past lives. There is little more seductive
in social history than the promise of access to the ‘voices’ of those normally
absent from the historical record. This appeal not only touches the general
public; details from Motztaillozi frequently act as benchmarks of ‘ground-
level’ authenticity in academic medieval histories too (Bossy 1985: 27). And
the appeal is particularly marked when, like Biatrice, the subaltern voice is
speaking of sexuality, contraceptive techniques, and personal feelings.
At the same time, however, there has been a long history of suspicion over
inquisitorial records, and the stories they tell us. Inquisitors questioned in
certain areas, but not in others; deponents were more garrulous over certain
topics (Beatrice, for example, hardly mentions her husbands). There were lies,
spies and the threat of torture. There is, at heart, a question of trust. Many
 The tiistorian as Inquisitor 381

historians have adopted the ‘source-critical’ approach advocated by Herbert

Grundmann (Grundmann 1965; Lerner 1972; Merlo 1977). The main
problem that these historians identify is that the inquisitorial language and
process places a ‘veil’ or ‘mask‘ over the ‘true’ voices of the deponents. To
‘penetrate’ that veil, and thus to let the subaltern voices have their say, would
constitute a methodological and ethical victory for the profession (Griffe
1971: 15).
But how does one ‘penetrate’ this veil? Two critiques of the work of Le
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Roy Ladurie and Ginzburg suggest that there are further problems. Renato
Rosaldo stresses the need to address the question of power in the records, and
in particular the ‘unequal dialogue’ between inquisitor and deponent. Le Roy
Ladurie, Rosaldo points out, notes the context of confession, but then:
Simply closes this opening to the interplay of power and knowledge by stress-
ing . .. the scrupulous will to truth that drove [the inquisitor]... .
Deploying
a tactic made familiar by Michel Foucault, the narrator invokes the will to truth
in order to suppress the document’s equally present will to power.
(Rosaldo 1986: 80-1)

Dominick LaCapra, critiquing The Cheese mid the Worms, similarly points
out that Ginzburg does not really address the ‘skewed reciprocity’ of the
inquisitorial register (LaCapra 1985: 62-3). He further suggests that to search
for a voice ‘beyond’ the text is to fall for the phonocentric myth of the lost
origin, ‘so thoroughly deconstructed by Jacques Derrida’ (LaCapra 1985: 52).
Inquisitors did not just record the speech, they prompted and shaped it. So
an attempt to ‘let the subaltern speak‘, understood as ‘speak again’, must
examine the context of power for both those discursive events; that is, the
context of inquisitorial confession, and the context of historiographical rep-
resentation.2
It is here that the ‘ethical’ question becomes more complex, or more
controversial. Both Rosaldo and LaCapra move from a critique of method-
ology to a critique of the power relations between historian, inquisitor and
deponent. They argue that the positions of historian and inquisitor can
become worryingly blurred. If the historian is in danger of sliding into the
position of the inquisitor, making the real inquisitor disappear in order that
the ‘truth‘ of the records can be authorized, we have a different kind of ethical
problem. The question can therefore be rewritten: no longer ‘can we free the
subaltern voice?’, but ‘how can we avoid colonizing the subaltern voice,
whilst also avoiding the snare of dissolving the Subject once more into
silence?’. But neither Rosaldo nor LaCapra really give us any clues here.
Rosaldo implicitly pushes the need for historians and anthropologists to be
self-reflexive, which is of course important, but offers no solution. LaCapra,
on the other hand, somehow finds himself arguing for a return to the sources,
 382 John H.Arnold

as if this would in some way overcome the methodological problems

(LaCapra 1985: 63).
Ginzburg’s essay ‘The Inquisitor as Anthropologist’ may be taken as an
implicit reply to LaCapra and Rosaldo (Ginzburg 1989). He refutes the ‘pes-
simistic conclusion’ over problems with the records, and tries once again to
emphasize the ‘will to truth‘ in the documents: that the inquisitors’ urge ‘for
their own truth’ produces rich evidence, albeit evidence ‘deeply distorted’ by
the context. The records must be read as dialogic, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s
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term; they present competing voices, and hence ‘in some exceptional cases’
the subaltern voice breaks free (Ginzburg 1989: 158-60). Now Ginzburg
makes some helpful moves here, particularly by bringing in Bakhtin, and by
insisting that we are not bound by inquisitorial categories. But problems still
remain: what is the ‘prior’ state of the language the inquisitors ‘distort’? How
can there be speech available to us before the records? And if the records are
dialogic (though I think Ginzburg’s reading of Bakhtin is in any case some-
what reductive) why do only ‘exceptional’ voices break free? What is our
response, as historians, to the ‘unexceptional’ voices?
The historiographical project here revolves around a concern for the indi-
vidual Subject, a desire that whatever ‘voice’we recover or free from the past,
it should not be the bland, over-theorized voice of class or discursive con-
struction, but the vibrant and empathetically appealing voice of a real, living
individual. It is a desire, ultimately, to cheat the silence of death. At the same
time, this singular voice is often taken to stand for a wider cultural context,
to lend legitimacy by its individuality to an amorphous ‘oral culture’ or some-
thing similar (LaCapra 1985: 65-8). These concerns are made clear in a recent
and exciting book employing inquisitorial sources, Lyndal Roper’s Oedipus
and the Devil. Roper, in looking at the baroque challenge of witchcraft trials,
states that she had become ‘uneasy’ about the way one relates individual sub-
jectivity to the cultural context. For her, it is ‘inadequate to speak of collec-
tive beliefs and symbols’ or the ‘mere recapitulation of cultural stereotypes’
because of the ‘individual misery’ presented by certain deponents (Roper
1994: 2-3). Roper’s move is then to psychoanalysis, as a way of addressing
the discursive context of the records whilst keeping the individual as the final
goal. However, some problems persist: Roper does a certain violence to post-
structuralist theories of identity and power by talking of the ‘mere recapitu-
lation of cultural stereotypes’. If ‘cultural stereotypes’ here stand in for
‘discursive constructions’, one thing Foucault et al. have surely taught us is
that such things .are never ‘mere’. There is also a worrying slide between ‘the
body’ and ‘the psyche’ in her argument; it is by resting on a foundationalist
view of the body that she is able to leap to ‘the psyche’, justifying this move
by later claiming that in the early modern period, body and mind were not
seen as divided (Roper 1994: 16-17, 21). So, to rediscover ‘the individual’,
 The Historian as Inquisitor 383

Roper has to rest upon what looks suspiciously like a ‘collective belief’ in the
ontological status of the Subject.
I am strongly in sympathy with the ethical aims of Oedipus mid the Devil
- to avoid dissolving the Subject - but doubtful about the means, and indeed
about how ‘the Subject’ is conceived. It seems to me that there is a certain cir-
cularity in identifying ‘individual’ moments of pain (for it is the Subject in
pain that Roper wishes to identify) which leads one to an individual ‘psyche’,
which is, in turn, characterized by individual moments of pain. Apart from
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anything else, this seems to lead back to Ginzburg’s ‘exceptional cases’ that
break through the inquisitorial veil; if the ‘individual’ moments allow us to
identify ‘individuals’, then what of the presumed ‘non-individual’ moments?
Does only ‘the individual’ (as constructed by the historian) deserve the right
to post-mortem speech?
It is clear that we need a methodology for dealing with inquisitorial records
which is also a reflection upon the ethics of historical enquiry. Let me talk a
little about the methodological side first, and then move on to the ethics.
Ginzburg, as I have mentioned, uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism to describe
the sources. In a parallel fashion, discussing court records in general, Muir
and Ruggerio have stressed the ‘multivocal’ aspects of the documents (Muir
and Ruggerio 1994: ix). Following this lead, I would like to suggest firstly
that the depositions of inquisition are best understood as heteroglossic (to use
a different Bakhtinian term). That is, within the texts, one is confronted by a
multiplicity of voices in opposition; not just the inquisitor versus the de-
ponent, but conflicting and competing discourses of confession, heresy, crime,
sexuality, gender, literacy, class and so on (Dentith 1995: 22-40, 195-224).
It is important to emphasize texts. Ginzburg’s argument - that ‘historians of
early modern Europe ... sometimes use oral sources, or, more precisely,
written records of oral speech‘ (Ginzburg 1989: 156) - rests upon a slippage
between the ‘oral’ and the ‘textual’ ,yet inquisition was above all a textual
operation, concerned with the creation, re-creation and legitimation of docu-
ment after document. The initial conversation between inquisitor and de-
ponent gained its authority, its claim to ‘truth’, by virtue of its written-ness,
its ability to fix the confession of the witness into a textual record. So the
concept of ‘voice’ is here somewhat redefined: no longer the overheard ‘voice’
of the recovered (and colonized) historical Subject, but the more amorphous
and radical ‘voices’ of discourse, the voices with which we speak, and in
speaking, constitute and position ourselves within our various and multiple
subjectivities. Heteroglossia dissolves the ideological boundaries set around
the concept of ‘voice’ and replaces it with the concept of ‘voices’, which can
never be truly singular.
Let us return to Biatrice, who has been waiting to speak again since the
beginning of this essay. Beatrice speaks within multiple discourses, with
 384 john H. Arnold

multiple voices. She speaks within the inquisitorial discourse of heresy and
transgression, describing her (minimal) heretical activities; or rather, we
should remember, admitting her crimes. More widely, then, she speaks as a
penitent subject, where the inquisitorial discourse is one voice within the
larger speech act of confession. And the confessional mode of her speech spills
over into areas other than heresy, in particular into sexuality and sexual
conduct. She speaks also, therefore, within discourses of sexual transgression
(sleeping with a priest in church), femininity (the gendered language that
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frames her sexual encounters) and spirituality (how she, as a woman, might
square her sexual and spiritual activities). There are two important points to
be made here. The first is that these ‘voices’ can be analysed but never com-
pletely separated, either from each other or from the inquisitorial context,
since these discourses overlap and intertwine. The second is that these
‘voices’, in their particular textual enunciation, do not exist prior to the
record in any fashion that can be taken to recover or to stabilize a Subject
named Biatrice. Beatrice-in-the-record is confessing; would we try to claim
that this confessional speech occurs ‘elsewhere’ before the inquisitorial
context?
To return to the ethical question, have I not now fallen into the trap of dis-
solving the Subject and silencing Beatrice once again? Is this not (method-
ologically) a lost opportunity, and (ethically) a betrayal of my witness? It does
not have to be. One can (and should) read the constructed subject(s) of the
multiple discourses as possessing a degree of agency constructed within these
discourses; confession, in particular, depends upon a constructed subject who
is self-reflexive and autonomous, confessing ‘spontaneously’ on the subject of
his or her own self. So the confession is itself another poesis, a moment of
self-making. The heteroglossic nature of the records leads to conflicts, oppo-
sitions and ruptures in the text; the subject speaks within competing dis-
courses. So the ethical response of the historian to these sources is surely to
provide a critical and effective reading of these ruptures, which will have the
source speak against itself, against its own constraints. This is a project rooted
as much in the present as in the past; it can be no other way and must be
embraced as such. 1 cannot efface the desire to tell the narrative of BCatrice,
to read it as a story; so perhaps then I must endeavour to tell her story in a
way that foregrounds that desire, and attempts to interrogate it.
Let us no longer pretend to act as disinterested advocates for the dead,
taking a moment of struggle and fashioning from it a seamless narrative and
hermetic Subject, which is not so much a reanimated corpse as a golem,
indeed o w golem: a creature given life only by the words placed into its head.
Instead, let us accept that we have access to voices and subject-positions, not
to whole minds and persons. However, the desire for the historical Subject
should not simply be disregarded or effaced; the desire to commune with the
 The Historian as Inquisitor 385

dead, and the way that the silences of the text frustrate that desire, present
us with both a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge, not to ‘overcome’
these silences, and thus to ‘penetrate’ the past, but to reflect upon and under-
stand the disquietude of silence. An opportunity, not to fill the blanks of the
past with our own disguised and projected voices, but to consider our own
ethical construction as subjects; to take on board Foucault’s project of con-
ceiving new and flexible practices for constructing one’s self and one’s
relationship to others, both living and dead. An opportunity, perhaps, for the
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dead to interrogate us; for the silences of the past to provoke whatever sym-
pathetic echoes they might find in our present constructions of our own selves.
Maybe we should realize that although the present can and should tell stories
about its history, it must in the end forego its more necrophiliac desires for
interrogation and controL3

Notes
1 Bintrice de Plaririisolns Misteri by Rine Nelli (my thanks to Felicity Jones for this
reference).
2 Muir and Ruggerio do note the context of power for criminal records but still read
this as the imposition of a mask or veil (Muir and Ruggerio 1994: vii, ix).
3 This article emerges from a much larger work on medieval inquisition, Catharism
and the confessing subject, hopefully to be published in the near future.

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