Brandon Robidet
Brandon Robidet is a second-year MA student in medieval studies at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. His professional background is in pedagogy: he taught history and provided homework support in a middle school. He has also been part of a mentoring program at university, which led him to provide methodological and mental support for first-year students. Although he is passionate about teaching, historical material and research is what truly drives him. His current project (part of his MA studies) is to research the history of the commanderie de la Devèze, located in the east suburban area of Toulouse. The Order of Saint John of Jerusalem was quite active in Toulouse, and their archives have been preserved in outstanding conditions. Brandon is interested in social relationships, more precisely in how elites were maintaining their control over commoners, through an economic and legal study of the many contracts of la Devèze. His interest in the social history of Toulouse easily explains why he is thrilled to study one of the main patrimonial treasures of the Archives départementales de la Haute Garonne: the trial bags.
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Project: Cataloguing Trial Bags at the Archives Départementales de la Haute Garonne
Hired as research assistant to the project, Brandon is our man on the ground. His objective is to find trial bags created for the chambre de l’édit of Languedoc, as part of Sherilyn Bouyer’s PhD project. The Archives départementales de la Haute Garonne preserve nearly 100,000 trial bags, of which more than 90% remain untouched. This unique historical material is of great importance, and the bags are a major source for future studies in many fields of Occitan history. As such, Brandon's work also aims at offering researchers access to these documents, by putting the bags in preservation conditions (such as removing the dust and storing them in pH neutral envelopes) and by ensuring their visibility. To do so, he locates and enters the main information of each trial bag into the online database, which requires a good understanding of the justice system and a good eye for paleography. Finding trial bags from the chambre de l’édit is nevertheless quite a challenge, for two main reasons: these cases are drowned by the many bags produced by the parlement of Toulouse, and more importantly, bags from the seventeenth century do not have any classification whatsoever. It is essentially looking for a needle in a haystack. Brandon is therefore also developing a method to classify the trial bags of the chambre de l’édit.
Hired as research assistant to the project, Brandon is our man on the ground. His objective is to find trial bags created for the chambre de l’édit of Languedoc, as part of Sherilyn Bouyer’s PhD project. The Archives départementales de la Haute Garonne preserve nearly 100,000 trial bags, of which more than 90% remain untouched. This unique historical material is of great importance, and the bags are a major source for future studies in many fields of Occitan history. As such, Brandon's work also aims at offering researchers access to these documents, by putting the bags in preservation conditions (such as removing the dust and storing them in pH neutral envelopes) and by ensuring their visibility. To do so, he locates and enters the main information of each trial bag into the online database, which requires a good understanding of the justice system and a good eye for paleography. Finding trial bags from the chambre de l’édit is nevertheless quite a challenge, for two main reasons: these cases are drowned by the many bags produced by the parlement of Toulouse, and more importantly, bags from the seventeenth century do not have any classification whatsoever. It is essentially looking for a needle in a haystack. Brandon is therefore also developing a method to classify the trial bags of the chambre de l’édit.