James Given's Inquisition and Medieval Society (Cornell, 1997) has an elaborate
discussion of how the inquisitors' possession of a filing and retrieval system
served as a coercive technology against the accused. Lea's 3 volume history of
the inquisition contains several passages in which he illustrates how
inquisitors could induce confessions by reading out documents to illiterate
accuseds, or by pretending to.
Dale Hample
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