“Reading Archival Latin”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
20—23 May 2024 • Remote
Course overview
The Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA) in Barcelona contains one of the largest and richest archival collections relating to medieval Europe, comprising hundreds of thousands of documents, most from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and including financial records, royal letters, administrative documents, trial records, treaties, and many other genres. The documentation can be used for a whole range of topics including social, economic, political, institutional, gender, diplomatic, cultural and religious history.
The territories of the Crown of Aragon included much of the Iberian Peninsula, parts of southern France, Sicily and southern Italy, parts of Tunisia and Greece, the Balearics, Sardinia and other Mediterranean islands. It had a large and diverse urban population, was highly integrated into Mediterranean and European trade systems, and had significant populations of Muslims and Jews. It developed one of the earliest and most robust chanceries of medieval Europe; the collections of which have weathered the vicissitudes of history all but intact. Much of the documentation has yet to be used by historians. The skills seminar focused on the Latin-language documentation (from the eleventh to the mid-fourteenth centuries) in the archive’s collections.
This four-day intensive skills seminar focussd on a hands-on introduction to reading unedited Latin documents from a variety of the archive’s fonds and provide participants with an overview of the collections of the ACA, including access to online resources and reproductions.
Topics included: manuscript abbreviations, dating systems, place and personal names, and research resources and techniques. As much as possible the content will be catered to participants’ interests and needs. Medievalists of all disciplines, graduate students, and qualified undergraduate students, as well as library and archival professionals were encouraged to apply.
The goal is to provides attendees with a solid preparation for conducting work remotely via the PARES web portal and on-site at the ACA. Participants will find the skills and techniques which the course focuses on useful not only at the Archive of the Crown but at other medieval archives across Spain and Europe.
This Summer Skills Seminar builds on the experience of earlier editions, which participants signaled as “transformative” in terms of their research, and which provided them with an opportunity to network and lay the foundations for future collaborations. For information and participant reviews of our former Skills Seminars.
Program
Monday, 20 May
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. The History & Structure of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon
2. Pergaminos/Pergamins
Tuesday, 21 May
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. Reading the Registers: Structure & Abbrevations
2. The Royal Chancery: The Registers
Wednesday, 22 May
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. Who? What? Where? When?
2. Royal Letters
Thursday, 23 May
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. Beyond the Chancery
2. Research techniques
Faculty
The course will be conducted by Prof. Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies, CU Boulder). A graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (Phd, 2000) and now a historian of pre-Modern Spain and the Mediterranean, Catlos has been using the collections of the ACA since 1995, primarily for research into the social and economic history of the Crown of Aragon and Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations.
Participants
Imen Boussayoud
(History, Brown University)
Imen (she/hers) is a PhD Candidate in History at Brown University working on slavery in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Her dissertation will focus on manumission in the 15th and 16th century Canary Islands, exploring the circumstances and choices made by enslaved Muslim, indigenous Canary Islander, and coastal African peoples to center the ways that enslaved and free peoples negotiated the boundaries of slavery in the early Atlantic world. Her research interests more broadly include the histories of race and racial formation, emotional/affective history, gender/sexuality, identity & community building, and legal histories of slavery.
Eleanor Congdon
(Humanities and Social Sciences, Youngstown State University)
During my 22 years teaching World and Medieval History at Youngstown State University, I have continued the research which started as my dissertation at Cambridge University. I hope to ultimately publish my study on the activity of Venetian merchants working with Francesco da Marco Datini de Prato c. 1400. As time has passed and the field of education has evolved from teaching students into a more for-profit venture, time for research and writing has become scarce. I value Dr. Catlos’ Summer Schools for tuning up and keeping my paleographic skills alive: the Datini records use a mixture of Latin and Italian expressions which need a lot of practice to disentangle for transcription
Manolis Ulbricht
(History, University of Copenhagen/ Notre Dame University)
Manolis Ulbricht is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame. His EU-funded project “Documenta Coranica Byzantina (DoCoByz). Byzantino-Islamica in the Age of Digital Humanities” (2023-26) examines Greek translations of the Qur’an and anti-Islamic discoursesin Byzantine polemics and compare their impact on Latin traditions. .
Manolis Ulbricht earned his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin/Germany in Byzantine Studies with a dissertation on the Coranus Graecus—co-supervised by Angelika Neuwirth—preparing a Greek-Arabic synoptical edition with commentary and glossary of the first translation ever of the Qur’an accomplished into Greek in the 9th century CE. His research focuses on Christian-Muslim relations from the 7th–12th century, especially the diachronic reception the Qur’an and transfer of knowledge on Islam in Byzantium. He spent two years in Damascus for Qur’anic studies and several years in Greece for manuscript study, including Mount Athos. He was researcher and visiting scholar at the Chairs of Byzantine Studies in Berlin and München, the National University of Athens and National Hellenic Research Foundation, and research fellow at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Göttingen. His interdisciplinary research approach is based on the cross-road of Greek and Arabic philologies, Byzantine Orthodoxy, Muslim theology, and Eastern Christianity, paleography and codicology, digital humanities as well as Byzantine hymnology and music theory of the Eastern Mediterranean (maqām).
Carmeliz Ramas-Fisk
(Medieval Studies, Fordham University)
Carmeliz is a master’s student at Fordham University’s Medieval Studies program. Her research interests include the expressions and experiences of power and agency of women in the south of France and Catalonia during the High Middle Ages. She is currently in the process of developing her master’s thesis, which will focus on the lives of urban women in the Languedoc region prior to and immediately after the Albigensian Crusade
Anthony Saracino
(English, SUNY Binghamton)
Anthony Saracino is an English doctoral student at SUNY Binghamton. He studies late medieval and early modern mystical literature.
Jonathon Seyfried
(History, University of New Mexico)
Jonathan Seyfried, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, focuses on the late fourteenth century Crown of Aragon. His current research project investigates the relationship between cultural production and economic history. Jonathan’s general scholarly interests include Gender and Sexuality Studies, Late Medieval Financial History, Disability Studies, Paleography and Codicology. Prior to graduate school, Jonathan taught high school history for many years. He specialized in the teaching of AP World History and worked for the College Board as an AP Consultant.