'Did you see a heretic? When? Where? Who else was there?'. The inquisitor is questioning, and a suspect is replying; a notary is translating from the vernacular into Latin, and writing it down, abbreviating and omitting at will; later there is the reading out of a sentence in public and then, in a few cases, burning. At every stage there is a text: a list of questions, for example, or an inquisitor's how-to-do it manual. The substance and intention of these texts forms the subject of this book. The introduction brings them all together in an historiographical survey of the role of texts in...