The project iForal. Portuguese Municipal Charters in the Middle Ages:  an Historical and Linguistic Approach in the Digital Era developed an electronic edition of the first Portuguese royal charters, incorporating their most ancient documentary witnesses produced in Latin and the vernacular until the end of the 15th century.

Urban and rural communities received rules from secular or ecclesiastical masters regulating social coexistence, rights and duties, economic activities, and administrative, jurisdictional, or tax practices. These norms, expressed in charters, resulted from the convergence of the interests of both parties.

Over the centuries, the norm was successively rewritten, either in charters initially addressed to other lands or in ratifications of its content. Therefore, written words, graphic models, and forms of validation were circulated and adapted to each rewriting of the standard.

The survival of these charters and their formal and linguistic variation throughout the medieval period (or even beyond) is the main object of study for the iForal team, which has been developing resources and collaborative work in history, linguistics, and information technologies. The project’s central resource is its digital text editing platform, EDICOLAB, which allows collaborative and interdisciplinary work and will be available for other documentary corpora.

This international conference aims to present and debate some of the research results of the iForal team, in dialogue with other national and international multidisciplinary projects, also focused on historical documentation from the medieval period. The use of digital tools and resources that challenge the way of reading, editing and criticising these texts, the scope of comparative analysis and the limits of historical-linguistic interpretation of data will be under analysis.

We invite researchers, especially young researchers (doctoral students and recent PhDs), to present ongoing work on medieval documentation, from different perspectives (History, Linguistics, Textual Criticism, and Information Technologies). 

Possible topics (for 20-minute contributions related to medieval charters or other historical documentation) include, but are not limited to:

– production, use, and circulation of historical documents

– power agents and strategies

– documentary heritage

– normative traditions in interaction

– norm and territoriality

– social, political, economic categories

– linguistic diversity and variation

– emergence of vernacular languages

– writing and orality

– linguistic and spelling standardisation

– genetics and textual transmission

– textual studies and scholarly editing

– digital tools and resources

– digital edition and technological innovation

Submissions should be sent by October 15th, using an online form (see website), with name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and position, title of the proposed paper, and abstract (200 words in Portuguese, Spanish, English or French). Abstracts will be reviewed by the members of the scientific committee.

Decisions will be announced by November 15th, 2024. Selected papers shall be published in a post-conference volume.