Abstract:
On what grounds can we claim that there is causality between hostile language and persecution? There is an undeniable connection at a general level of worldview, and from the High Middle Ages onwards, European Christians increasingly engaged in both verbal and physical violence against heretics, Jews, Muslims and others they perceived as religious enemies. However, taken to the level of concrete persecutive acts, the causality becomes shaky: Did hostile language incite action, and in which ways? Were polemics written to justify already ongoing hostilities? The project PERSECUTIO (2023-2027, Research Council of Finland) aims to collect extensive, structured data on polemical texts, sermons and acts of persecution and explore them quantitatively and qualitatively. Välimäki presents the theoretical and methodological premises of the project and its current status.
About Reima Välimäki
Reima Välimäki is a docent of medieval history at the University of Turku and an Academy Research Fellow (2023–2027). His main research interests are medieval heresy and inquisition, polemical literature, the Great Western Schism and twenty-first-century political medievalism. He is the author of Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians (2019) and the editor of Medievalism in Finland and Russia: Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century Aspects (2022
