The 4th Session of the 2024 Medieval Studies Seminar will be held online via Zoom on June 5, 2024, at 4:00 p.m.

Dedicated to the theme “The Papacy seen from the ground: aspects of apostolic interventionism in the kingdom of Portugal (1309-1417)”, this session will be led by Mário Farelo (Departamento de História – Univ. do Minho).

As part of a cycle of seminars dedicated to the medieval Church, the presentation of a session on the Papacy is not surprising, considering the multifaceted importance – from religion to taxation, from politics to administration, from justice to culture, for example – that this institution millennial influence on the individuals and institutions of late-medieval Christianity.

This intervention will focus on a less-known aspect of operationalizing this same power: its intervention in the territory. Through selected cases, dating mainly from the periods conventionally called the Popes/Papacy of Avignon (1309-1377) and the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), we will seek to characterize the dimensions of this interventionism in the kingdom of Portugal, highlighting its relevance in a glocal reading of multiple aspects of Portuguese history at the end of the Middle Ages.

 

Biographical note:

Mário Farelo is an assistant professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Minho, an integrated member of Lab2PT, and a collaborating member of the Institute of Medieval Studies and the History Center of the University of Lisbon.

Master’s degree from the University of Montréal (1999); Master’s and doctorate in Medieval History from the University of Lisbon (2004; 2009). Former senior researcher of the ERC VINCULUM project (2019-2023).

His areas of specialization focus on the peripheral officialdom of the Crown, the history of medieval Lisbon, and the beneficial, diplomatic, and fiscal relations between Portugal and the Papacy in the late medieval period. It also investigates the ecclesiastical, urban, diplomatic, and cultural history of the kingdom of Portugal in the medieval period, namely the University of Lisbon-Coimbra and the Portuguese academic peregrination in the medieval and Renaissance periods.