Sometimes, it's all a bit much for my brain to handle. There are so many names and so many dates! It's not difficult when I'm passively reading a book and just following the author's narrative, but when I try to put together a new narrative, drawing on my recollections from more than one book I've previously read, confusion invariably sets in. I can, of course, go back to my bookshelf, take the books in question and find the relevant sections, but that's a time-consuming process. Moreover, I often don't recall exactly where I read something. I just recall a part of the story without being sure where it's from.
Peter of Castelnau, for example, the papal legate whose murder seemed to set the Albigensian Crusade in motion, had a very interesting career in the Languedoc for years before his death. Various historians who were not specifically telling his story have mentioned incidents in which he was involved -- forming a league of rebel barons against Count Raymond of Toulouse, trying to force the Bishop of Beziers to excommunicate the town's consuls, mediating the marital dispute between Pedro II of Aragon and Maria of Montpellier, receiving advice from Diego de Acebes and Dominic Guzman, accompanying Arnau-Amalric. I'm sure there are other mentions of him which I'm not currently bringing to mind. I'm also not sure when he was appointed a papal legate. I've read it, but there wasn't anything to fix that date in my mind in the context of his own timeline. In the absence of any available biography which might lay out his activities in a clear order, it's very difficult to organize the bits I know into a story.
I know there were many debates between representatives of the church and opponents who are usually depicted as "Cathars". The two which I can recall many details about were at Lombers and Pamiers, but I know there were many others during the preaching campaign. I would like to be able to put them in order and review the names of the participants to see whether there were any debaters who challenged church representatives in more than one place or time. It's impossible for me to do it from memory.
These are but two examples of the constant difficulty I have in assembling many diverse pieces of information from different sources, when there are so many characters and so many dates. I've tried making paper notes but I've soon filled too many pages with topics which are difficult to cross-reference. The solution which comes to mind is, obviously, using database software to describe events, organize them by date, and tag them with the names of people and places involved. I'm not aware of there being any such software developed with historians in mind, but after asking around a bit, a friend recommended Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) to me and I began to use it.
I'm now about three hundred notes in to the creation of my database of events on the Albigensian Crusade and some drawbacks to the system have presented themselves. The most serious is the lack of chronology functions. I had entered various incidents in which Peter of Castelnau appears, for instance, and could easily bring up just the incidents in which he figured, but there was no apparent way to specify the dates of the incidents. I thought of modifying the "Date Created" field, which Evernote uses as a default for sorting, but the creators of Evernote understandably didn't anticipate entries being created in the 13th century.
The solution I hit upon was entering the date in numerical format (yyyy.mm.dd) as the subject line of each entry, which does allow chronological sorting, but demands a specificity that is hard to come by. Primary sources on the Albigensian Crusade are not as clear on dates as we might wish and even modern historians are often vague, leaving me with only the knowledge that one event happened at some time after a certain date or before another. My sorting system does not do well with such vaguaries. There are other things I want to describe in notes which didn't happen all in one day, but cover a date range of months or years.
Nonetheless, despite such hindrances, I am impressed by the possibilities which Evernote offers me for historical analysis. In the end, I hope to have entries for all of the major and many of the minor events related to the Albigensian Crusade. In each entry, I will enter first what the primary sources report, and then what historians have retold. Thus, eventually, it should make the job of sorting out the historiography much easier. The differences between historians' accounts will appear more clearly and, if these differences are based on which primary source the historian chose to accept, that will be clear too.
The other possibility that this database will offer is that of quickly accessing scattered pieces of information to assemble them into a chronological sequence about a certain person, place or theme. It is my hope that this will enable new possibilites for narrative to become apparent, even where I had not thought to look for them.
Unfortunately, it is a very time consuming process. I am obtaining what books I can in PDF format so that I can cut and paste relevant sections into the database. In other cases, Evernote's built-in OCR functions (image-to-text) are a great deal of help, although they still require proof-reading. When the database is larger, at some point in the future, I will consider finding a way to make a publicly-accessible copy in case anyone else would like to use it, or contribute to it.
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