PTDC/EPH-HIS/4323/2012

Research Unit: IEM-NOVA FCSH 
Associated Research Unit: CEG

Lead Researcher: Adelaide Millán da Costa 
Research Team:  António Manuel Hespanha, Fernando Pinto da Rocha, Filipa Roldão, Jorge Trindade, José Subtil, Luís Miguel Duarte, Maria Helena da Cruz Coelho, Mário Farelo, Marta Gonçalves, Nuno Camarinhas and Vitor Rocio
Research fellows: Diogo Nuno Machado Pinto Faria and Nuno Filipe Moura Rodrigues
Duration: 2013-2014

This project aims to dismantle the process by which the crown systematically and permanently instituted the appointment of literate judges for the most important municipalities in the kingdom of Portugal. In order to do so, it identifies a period of time, roughly corresponding to the 16th century, which has so far been omitted from research. The reasons for this absence are related to the divisions between medievalists and modernists who end up establishing time barriers in their studies, neglecting the key periods. And, of course, the gradual evolution of the legal order and the functioning of institutions throughout the Ancien Régime does not fit in with artificial historiographical cuts.

In these circumstances, the project is innovative because it brings together specialists from the Medieval and Modern periods, not to join forces in a long-duration research project (without abandoning their respective chronologies, at the very least applying a similar analysis grid) but to share research into a short period, a century, which is considered a “no man’s land” in terms of the evolution of the crown’s judicial apparatus. The project is also benefiting from the help of geographers specializing in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), with the aim of making it possible to track, in graphic terms, the existence of some spatial logic or specific times in the progress of the appointment of judges from abroad.

Project marker