Lead Researcher: Maria de Lurdes Rosa
Host Institution: NOVA FCSH
Project Duration at IEM NOVA FCSH: 2019 – February 2024

The “VINCULUM” project emerges out of the continued interest of the lecturer and researcher in the theme of entailment in pre-modern Iberian society. Having begun studying majorat in Portugal during her undergraduate degree, this became the object of her master’s dissertation (published in 1995) and, from a new perspective, specifically the importance of the founding of funereal chapels in late medieval Lisbon in her doctoral degree thesis, defended at EHESS-Paris and UNL (published in 2012). This research gained a new direction and added vitality with the research and heritage defence program that Maria de Lurdes Rosa has been developing since 2008 under the auspices of the IEM, with the occasional collaboration of other History research units (CHAM and IHC).

The program already counts on an FCT funded research project, participation in international projects and programs, six doctoral degree theses finished or under completion and a vast set of publications. Maria de Lurdes Rosa particularly highlights two aspects in this process: on the one hand, the connection to civil society, implemented through the participation of the owners of private archives that open them up to university archive researchers; on the other hand, the direct involvement of young researchers in this team, ranging from undergraduate to doctoral students.

The VINCULUM project seeks to explain how entailment became possible, how this functioned and why it lasted so many centuries. Based on the Portuguese and Iberian case, and the extensive research already undertaken by the LR and the team, the project plans to study ‘entailment’ as a varied but fundamental practice, set in legal principles, aristocratic discourse and an organisational configuration based on parentage, implementing wide reaching and holistic analysis. The approach adopted in the research incorporates a clear overstepping of the traditional boundaries, focusing on study of the 14th to 17th centuries and the continental and Atlantic contexts; and also including comparative perspectives, such as studying the future social reconfigurations of entailment.

The project extends to extensive documental surveys, both of public archives and private family archives that were opened to research by the ARQFAM program, led by Maria de Lurdes Rosa since 2008. The gathering of data shall enable the construction of a major database, bringing together all the documents relating to each entailment, following a theoretical model that seeks to reconstruct the past information systems, thereby testing a new methodology developed in research pre-dating this proposal. The database will bring together around 7,000 entailments and allow for organised and systematic research of the new conceptual proposals made by the project. The research is highly interdisciplinary, deploying historical anthropology and archive sciences with the objective of building a theoretical model appropriate to understanding the crucial legal and social phenomena underpinning entailment.

In terms of its internal articulation, VINCULUM features four phases, implemented through means of six projects: 1) questioning, analysing and describing the structure of sources, involving an extensive document survey leading to the establishment of a database on the foundations of entailment and their archives (project 1); 2) thematic analysis of the social agency of entailment (projects 2, 3 and 4, dedicated respectively to “Parentage”, “Power”, “Identity”; 3) thorough and comparative analysis of entailment societies in the Atlantic space (project 5); 4) an interpretative summary of the overall project results (project 6).

This also considers the dimensions of diffusion and scientific training, increasingly important within the core of European research. The project foresees two types of events for dissemination: the VINCULUM Project Days, destined to the public in general and schools, and undertaken in four sites across Portugal, including Madeira and the Azores, and incorporating grants for the participation of Cape Verdean students; and a workshop on heritage protection for the owners of family archives. Furthermore, this maintains a post-graduate study seminar within the framework of the programs available at the FCSH, between years 2 and 5.

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