The Medieval Public Sphere and the Response to a Condemnation for Heresy in Bologna, 1299

Bologna, 1299. The purse-makers Bompietro and Giuliano are burned at the stake as heretics by the Dominican Inquisition. A discussion about the lack of fairness of the condemnation ensues and spreads all over the city. The outrage of the Bolognese community is such that an investigation into the disorders and a mass excommunication follow. This article uses the Bolognese episode, for which a rich documentation survives in the form of inquisitorial records, as a lens through which to observe and comment on the phenomenon of the ‘public sphere’ (a term coined in Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit) in medieval Europe. The first aim of the article is to demonstrate that it is possible to reconstruct a ‘public sphere’ in the specific context of the public response to the condemnation for heresy of the two purse-makers. In so doing, the article looks at the social composition and at the communication mechanisms of, and at the discussion taking place within, the Bolognese public sphere. Importantly, it proposes the idea that the Inquisition too was a public authority around which a public sphere could develop, in contrast to the focus on secular political institutions of the previous historiography. The second aim is to build on the evidence presented to demonstrate that the notion of the ‘public sphere’ can be an effective tool for the study of the interaction between the people and public authorities in the pre-modern world—if the critical functions rather than the structural characteristics of the phenomenon are emphasised.