The Historian as Inquisitor The ethics of interrogating subaltern voices John H. Arnold School of History, University of East Anglia ‘We command you to cite at once, and immediately, Béatrice, widow of Otho de Lagleize . . . o appear in person next Saturday before us in our Seat at Pamiers, to respond to certain allegations concerning the Catholic faith. (Duvernoy 1965: 216} Escoutez. In medieval Languedoc, there lived a woman called Béatrice 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 chatelain of the village of Montaillou, high in the Pyrenean mountains. Berengar’s steward, Raymond, tried to'woo Béatrice, asking her to run away with him to Lombardy to join the Cathar heretics there. Béatrice refused Raymond’s solicitations, and when he entered her bed uninvited one night, she threw him out. Béatrice 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, Béatrice out- lived her second husband too. In 1316 she fell in love with a young priest, Barthélemy Amilhac, who ran a class which her daughters attended. Barthélemy and Béatrice 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: Béatrice was cited for questioning by the inquisitor Bishop Jacques Fournier on the crime of heresy. Béatrice was questioned once, then ran away, back to Barthélemy, but Barthélemy 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 Barthélemy, 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. Béatrice’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 © Routledge 1998 1364-2529380 John H. Arnold Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s best seller Montaillou (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 Béatrice because of the bishop Jacques Fournier (later Pope Benedict XII), whose letter of citation is quoted at the head of this article; or rather, we know about Béatrice 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; Béatrice, as a member of the lower nobility, is cone 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 Montaillou frequently act as benchmarks of ‘ground- level’ authenticity in academic medieval histories too (Bossy 1985: 27). And the appeal is particularly marked when, like Béatrice, 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 (Béatrice, 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 Historian as Inquisitor 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 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 and 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.? 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, 381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 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 e¢ 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 Roper has to rest upon what looks suspiciously like a ‘collective belief? in the ontological status of the Subject. am strongly in sympathy with the ethical aims of Oedipus and 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 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? Itis 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 Béatrice, who has been waiting to speak again since the beginning of this essay. Béatrice speaks within multiple discourses, with 383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 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 Béatrice. Béatrice-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 Béatrice 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. | cannot efface the desire to tell the narrative of Béatrice, 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 our 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 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 control. Notes 1 Béatrice de Plannisolas Misteri by Réne Nelli (my thanks to Felicity Jones for this reference). 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. References Bossy, John (1985) Christianity in the West 1400-1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dentith, Simon (ed.) (1995) Bakbtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader, London: Routledge. Duvernoy, Jean (ed.} (1965) Le Registre de ' Inquisition de Jacques Fournier v que de Pamiers (1318-1325), Toulouse: Privat, 3 vols. (ed, and trans.) (1978) Le Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier (v que de Pamiers) 1318-1325, Paris: Mouton, 3 vols. Ginzburg, Carlo (1989) [1986] Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gritfe, Elie (1971} Le Languedoc Cathare de 1190 4 1210, Paris: Letouzey & Ané. Grundmann, Herbert (1965) ‘Ketzerverhére des Spatmirtelalters als quellenkritisches problem’, Deutsches Archiv 21: 519-75. LaCapra, Dominick (1985) ‘The cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a twentieth- century historian’, in D. LaCapra, History and Criticism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 45-69.386 John H. Arnold Lerner, Robert E. (1972) The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, London: University of California Press. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel (1980) [1978] Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324, trans. B. Bray, London: Penguin. Merlo, Grado G. (1977] Eretici e Inquisitori nella Societa Piemontese del Trecento, Torino: Claudiana. Muir, Edward and Ruggerio, Guido (1994) ‘Introductio Muir and G. Ruggerio (eds) History from Crime, tran Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. vii-xviii. Roper, Lyndal (1994) Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge. the crime of history’, in E. C.B. Curry et al., Baltimore: Rosaldo, Renato (1986) ‘From the door of his tent: the fieldworker and the inquisitor’, in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 77-97