A study paying particular attention to methodology risks posing numerous caveats, setting subtle distinctions, dissecting the evidence and being left with the scattered pieces of a broken machine, without the tools to make sense of them. Records, however, should not be seen as crumbs of reality. In our inquisitorial volumes, the pieces are kept together by an inherent consistency. This lies, first of all, in two crucial features underpinning the formation of these texts, but also in their reading.

The first feature is that inquisitors were jurists and legal officials acting on behalf of the papacy. Despite their personal take on the whole business of ‘faith and peace’ (negotium pacis et fidei), their task was to instruct, conduct and record a legal procedure aiming at the establishment of responsibilities in the deviation from religious conformity. Awareness of this aspect makes the process of reading and interpreting inquisitorial records remarkably germane to reading and interpreting records of ‘lay’ enquiries. Religious and lay crime were intertwined during the Middle Ages, and officials pursuing the finding and punishment of transgressors operated following similar dynamics, and relying on the support of similar – sometimes the same – legal structures and personnel. For the purpose of our records, inquisitors were judges and detectives, first and foremost.