Visiting researchers

Ander Salinas Garrido

Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea UPV / EHU
February

“Administrative transformation and relationship between monarchy and nobility in 13th-century Kingdom of Navarre”

The main objective of my doctoral thesis involves analysing the ways in which the nobility were rewarded for their services to the Navarrese monarchy throughout the 13th century. Hence, I begin with analysis of the land leasing system under the reign of Sancho VII the Strong (1194-1234), which already displays indications of what would become the new territorial organisation headed by the Merindades in order to portray how this noble house was integrated into the new state structures that were then under formation. Subsequently, I aim to study the emergence and consolidation of this new administrative and institutional reality led by the Merindades and the different royal appointees under the reigns of Teobaldo I, Teobaldo II, Enrique I (1270-1274) and Juana I (1274-1305), as well as new means of distributing income. 

The arrival point for my research is the conflict breaking out in 1276, known as the Navarrese Civil War, in which a large proportion of the senior nobility rebelled against the monarch. As a consequence of this war, many noble Navarrese houses were dissolved and their properties seized by the king. These properties were registered in the kingdom’s Book of Accounts with the study objective of ascertaining the importance of the benefits that the nobles obtained in service of the king, for example, serving as governors of castles or as the stewards of granted fiefdoms, in comparison with what they obtained from the earnings from their own personal wealth. 

E-mail
ander.salinas@ehu.eus

Carlos Crespo Amat

Universidad de Alicante
1 Outubro 2022 – Setembro 2024

E-mail
carloscrespo@fcsh.unl.pt

Edmar Checon de Freitas

Niterói-RJ, Brasil
November

Biographic note
Doctoral degree in History from the UFF – Fluminense Federal University (2004), Master’s Degree in History from the same university (2000) and an undergraduate degree in History from UFES – the Espírito Santo Federal University (1996). A visiting researcher at GAHOM (Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval), at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – EHESS-Paris (Post-doc. Senior Intern type – CAPES, 2014-2015). A former professor at the Anísio Teixeira Centre of Studies (Serra-ES, 2002-2006), and the Faculty of Batista de Vitória – FABAVI (Vitória and Serra – ES, 2000-2006) and a substitute professor at the ES Federal University (1997-1998). Since 2006, he has lectured in the Department of History and Post-Graduate History Program at UFF and is currently an Associate Professor. He undertakes research and supervises master’s and doctoral degrees in the following research fields: High Middle Ages (5th-10th cen.), especially Merovingian Gaul; Christianism and Christian culture; Christian monarchism; worship of the saints and relics in the Middle Ages; medieval hagiography; narrative and representations of the past in the Middle Ages; medieval cures and medicine.

E-mail
edmarcfreitas@gmail.com

José Maria García Ríos

University of Córdoba, Spain  

May 

Internship within the framework of the VINCULUM Project Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body (Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries) financed by the European Research Council 

The central objective of my research visit, both to CIDEHUS (Évora) and to NOVA University (Lisbon), constitutes making a first approach to the reality I shall be studying over forthcoming years under the supervision of Prof. Enrique Soria Mesa. We are aiming to analyse the evolution in property ownership under the Hispanic Monarchy during the modern period. 

A legal formula, as we know, capable of maintaining the family heritage intact and inalienable, passed down from generation to generation through means of a predetermined order of succession. Through this mechanism, thousands of families were obliged to make recourse to the entailment of a portion of their assets and goods to avoid the more than predictable dispersions of their legacy among their descendants, fundamentally through mayorazgos, in the Spanish case, and morgadios, (majorat) in the Portuguese case. 

It goes without saying that this would be the most efficient and profitable means when dealing with maintaining significant levels of fortune. However, the consequences went further as these foundations also assisted in enabling the social consolidation of all family members, preserving the glory and intangible heritage of the lineage. Without recourse to such institutions, it was fully acceptable to the collective imaginary of the epoch, that any free assets would, sooner or later, end up leaving the family’s perimeter, whether through means of sale, marriage, heritage, negligence or misfortune. 

The originality of this research stems from analysis of entailment as the ideal platform not only for the protection of the entailed assets but especially the aggregate asset legacy. This capacity, which stems from the hereditary laws of this institution, underpins the social rise of the thousands of families that emerged out of the categories of the unprivileged and who, from 1505 onwards, began to place their goods under entailment with many of their descendants ending up joining the nobility through the accumulation of dozens of mayorazgos and morgadios. 

Hence, we shall attempt established parallels — and also differences — between the two kingdoms (Castille and Portugal) with the objective of portraying the foundation rhythms, the typologies, the social backgrounds of the founders, the assets integrated into this institution, the clauses and conditions thereby imposed, etcetera. 

Therefore, this is an ambitious project given that, at least in the Spanish case, the literature still needs deepening in terms of the socioeconomic characteristics of this mechanism to thus better grasp its scale and magnitude. Hence, collaboration with the members of the Vinculum project reflects an essential step given their years of intense work on these matters, concentrating efforts and resources analysing the foundations of entailment in the Portuguese context. 

Pablo López Gómez

Universidad de León, Spain
April-June

“La gestión de los comunales en la Cornisa Cantábrica desde la época medieval a la actualidad. Resiliencia, conflictividad y paisaje“

This doctoral thesis integrates into the LLABOR (Laboratoriu Rural de Historia y Patrimoniu) working group and the research projects under ELCOS (Espacios Locales y Complejidad Social. Las raíces Medievales de un conflicto del siglo XXI HAR2016-76094-C4-1-R) and ENCAM (En Nombre de la Comunidad. Comunidades campesinas en áreas de montaña: definición territorial, gestión colectiva y lugares centrales en la formación de las identidades locales REF: PID2020-112506GB-C43).  

The doctoral research objective involves depicting the rural communities in the mountains of the northern Iberian Peninsula, paying particular attention to areas for collective usage. Through this, we seek to establish the communities themselves as the centre of research attention in order to ascertain their capacity for agency in the territorial processes, the resilience in their forms of occupying these spaces and the changes taking place to the conception and utilisation of property. To this end, we are implementing a methodology that incorporates a diachronic perspective in combining written sources, local popular knowledge and archaeological data. 

This methodology was applied to two mountain micro-spaces: Andrúas and Cueiru. Two archaeological palimpsests serve to document the different periods in the occupation of the same area as well as rendering visible the asymmetric pressures wielded by the communities in different points in time. Thus, we document the sites from the first pre-historical occupation through to the intensification of usage during the Middle Ages. Furthermore, this also enables the depiction of the community strategies that underwent implementation to maintain the collective rights to usage of common land through to contemporary times. 

E-mail
plopeg@unileon.es

Rodrigo Moreno Torrero

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

“Eva: Espacios Virtuales de la Alteridad”

My research internship at the Institute of Medieval Studies (NOVA FCSH) takes place under the project Eva: Espacios Virtuales de la Alteridad, run by Prof. Marisa Bueno Sánchez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). The project’s core objective is the identification and analysis of the building infrastructures of the Christian communities resident in Al-Andalus. Within this line of study, my work during this internship concentrates on undertaking the most exhaustive approach possible to the different textual and material sources related to the Andalucian Christian communities living in contemporary Portuguese terrain. In addition, I shall concentrate my studies on analysing two paradigmatic cases: the cities of Lisbon and Coimbra.

The results obtained shall be analysed globally alongside other already studied cases, for example the Spanish cities of Huesca and Toledo. This comparative work seeks to aid the establishing of a unified discourse covering the entire Iberian Peninsula and describing a historical reality that has hitherto been worked in different ways in the Portuguese and Spanish national historiographies.

This furthermore extends to the research project: The Historical Village of Idanha-a-Velha: City, Territory and Population in Classical Antiquity (Ist cen. B.C. – 12th A.D.), IGAEDIS; financed by the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology at the Institute of Medieval Studies (NOVA FCSH). Working here under Dr. Tomás Cordero Ruiz, this has produced various projects for the reconstruction and 3D virtualisation of the different buildings making up the historical village of Idanha-a-Velha.

Biographic note
Currently studying under a predoctoralcontract at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), financed by the Espacios Virtuales de la Alteridad research project and writing his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Tomás Cordero (IEM | NOVA FCSH) and Marisa Bueno (UCM). His research focuses on the contacts between Christians and Moors in al-Andalus, especially the material expression and consequences of these relationships. In the case of the city of Toledo, he published two works relating to the problem of the decontextualised epigraphs from the Visigoth period and their utilisation within the scope of defining the meeting places for Andalucian Christians. He is also a member of the UCM research group Mucrishis: Cristianos y Musulmanes en el Medievo Hispano.

Viviana Persi

Université de Lille 2, France
May-June

“Development of research within the scope of her doctoral degree thesis on “The transposition of juridical language to figurative language in juridical manuscripts (13th-18th centuries)”

Biographic note

Viviana Persi, an archivist-palaeographer and legal historian, graduated from Ecole Nationale des Chartes (Promotion 2014), with her thesis on the History of Law under the supervision of professor Patrick Arabeyre, studied at La Sapienza – Università di Roma (Faculdade de Direito and Scuola Speciale per Archivisti and Bibliotecari). She is currently a doctoral degree student at Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire (CHJ) – Université de Lille 2 – Faculté de Droit et Santé, where her thesis is entitled La transposition du langage juridique en langage figuratif dans les manuscrits juridiques enluminés XIIIe-XVe siècles. Her key research interests approach the history of institutions and the diplomatic publication of medieval and modern legal sources, with a particular emphasis on protocols and notary deeds and judicial documents. Her research studies on these fields, for which she was awarded three grants, took place primarily at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Archivio di Stato di Roma, the Archivio di Stato di Siena and Univertsità di Roma 3. She has been presenting the results of this research at various conferences, both in Italy and abroad (Max Plank Institut für europaïsche Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt, 12-17 July 2009). She is currently working on illuminated medieval manuscripts and discussed the first results of her work at a seminar at the Ghent Law Faculty (29 March 2019). She also co-organised a study day entitled Histoire et Gouvernance : interactions et conflits entre les acteurs et les normes (6 de Dezembro de 2019) at the Lille Law Faculty.