ABSTRACT
Using the inquisitions in Bern and Fribourg as examples, this chapter argues that even the anti-Waldensian inquisitions which involved more traditional mendicant inquisitors demonstrated greater participation from city councils in controlling the outcome and legacy of each trial. Already the following year, according to the seventeenth-century chronicle Annals of Nuremberg, the city council appointed one of Nuremberg's own citizens to investigate heresy within its walls in an attempt to assume full control of the persecution of religious deviance typical of late medieval cities. In his recent study of inquisitor Peter Zwicker, Reima Valimaki points out the importance of communication and, in particular, preaching to an inquisitor. Communication between city governments at a time of crisis was not unprecedented. Although more recent studies have rejected Fiertz's interpretation of the trial, she was the first to propose analyzing the anti-Waldensian inquisition as a political affair and not merely as a persecution of unorthodox belief.
