The second session of the Cycle of Lectures: Manuscritos de Alcobaça will take place on April 28th, and will feature lectures by Manuel Pedro Ferreira and Maria João Branco:

1st Conference
“Livros apontados de solfa: seu papel, sua irradiação”, by Manuel Pedro Ferreira (Departamento de Ciências Musicais e Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Ciência Musical da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

The place of music books in the establishment of Cistercian monastic worship, with special reference to the antiphonaries and processionals from Alcobaça.

2nd Conference
“Em torno do Alc. 144. Revisitando a Cultura jurídica alcobacense”, by Maria João Branco (Departamento de História e Instituto de Estudos Medievais da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Manuscript Alc. 144 produced in the first half of the 12th century, and currently preserved in the Fundo de Códices Alcobacenses of the National Library of Portugal, is an exceptional manuscript in many ways. Firstly, because it contains a very rare early compilation of decretals by Pope Alexander III, and secondly, because it seems to attest to a non-Alcobacian, probably English, provenance, which makes it a testimony to a circulation of manuscripts that can shed much light on the world of legal culture that we can recognize in this Cistercian cenoby, so involved in the meanderings of the struggles between ecclesiastical institutions and kings, and which remains one of the few Portuguese archival collections where medieval legal manuscripts can be identified to this day. Based on the analysis of this manuscript, the present communication intends to revisit what we know about the men of Alcobaça, their legal culture and the outstanding intervention they had in the issues that arose during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when the cenobium played a key role in mediating political and ecclesiastical conflicts.