Recovering Dispersed Dissent: LLM-Assisted Extraction of Religious Authority Contestation from Medieval Inquisition Archives (1243–1522)

The contestation of religious authorities – direct verbal challenges to ecclesiastical legitimacy, clerical conduct, and sacramental power – is dispersed thinly across medieval inquisition records and overshadowed by other topics. Scholarship recognizes its presence in dissident milieus but has never quantified its frequency or examined the social and temporal factors shaping its expression. This dispersal across thousands of documents in dozens of registers made systematic analysis technically unreachable for unassisted scholarship.

We deployed Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 to classify and extract relevant passages from 4,357 testimonies spanning 20 inquisition registers (South-Western France, North-Central Italy, Switzerland, England; 1243–1522). LLM classification was validated against independent human coding on random samples of 200 testimonies per variable, achieving 85–99% agreement. We then examined whether four factors correlate with contestation frequency: religious culture, urban versus rural setting, temporal period, and gender.

Results reveal distinct patterns: reformistic dissidents (Waldensians, Beguins, Lollards) articulated authority contestation much more frequently than separatistic groups (Cathars, Apostles, Guglielmites). Urban-dominated registers paradoxically contain fewer such contestations. Temporal analysis demonstrates genuine growth in authority contestation toward the Reformation, affirming expanding lay engagement with ecclesiastical legitimacy. Gender showed no significant effect.

This study illustrates how LLM-assisted extraction, when grounded in rigorous prompt design and human validation, transforms what was previously dispersed beyond scholarly reach into a dataset amenable to quantitative cultural-historical analysis.