Maria de Lurdes Rosa, integrated researcher at the Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM) and lecturer at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University (NOVA FCSH), has just received the first Consolidator Grant in the area of History awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to a Portuguese researcher.
The awarding of this million plus financing for the project VINCULUM. Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries) will enable the recruitment of five post-doc scholars and four Master’s Degree students to carry out historical research in private and public archives throughout Portugal, including the islands.
This research, based on documentation produced between the 14th and 17th centuries (in some cases never before studied by historians), aims to achieve a new definition of the pre-modern entailment bond, which essentially considers this lineage based bond as a social agent, whose main components are kinship, power, and identity. The approach adopted by in the project is clearly based on overcoming the traditional boundaries, consecrating the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries as the period of study and spanning the mainland Portugal and Atlantic geographies; and furthermore including both comparative perspectives and the study of future social reconfigurations of entailment bonds.
Historical studies based on the collected material and the constitution of a vast documental database are among the core tasks of this five-year project.