Digitizing Women of Medieval Iberian Historiography

Project Information

FEMIber

Grant agreement ID: 101064789

DOI

10.3030/101064789

Project closed

EC signature date 13 July 2022

Start date 1 March 2023

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 213 505,20

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FEMIber (Digitizing Women of Medieval Iberian Historiography)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Historiography in the Middle Ages generally downplayed women’s societal and political roles, and the additional focus on royalty often led to omission of other strata. This distorted image, however, is not limited to the medieval society. Only a few decades ago, researchers were not as interested in various, usually marginalized or misrepresented, groups, and there is still a significant gender gap in our collective cultural memory, especially when it comes to non-English medieval women.
This interdisciplinary project intentionally reframed the male-centered narrative to shed light on various digital ways medieval women from the Iberian culture should be studied. The corpus consists of the Crónica de Castilla (ca. 1300, Kingdom of Castile-León) and the Portuguese genealogical work Livro de Linhagens do Deão (ca. 1343). The first work is one of the most widely disseminated chronicles of the Iberian Peninsula, and the latter belongs to the three great Portuguese genealogies written before 1350. While there are important studies on women in both of these works, they are usually limited to a few documented individuals and/or studied intertextually. This project is the first one to explore women and gender-based aspects in both works via digital humanities methods and tools.
By shifting the spotlight on underexplored aspects via digital approaches, the project looked for transparent and sustainable ways of advancing research. Moreover, considering the limited presence of medieval women in our modern-day cultural expressions and curricula, another aim of the project was to place its output in the context of cultural heritage and use it for educational purposes in a number of ways.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

After gaining skills in digital prosopography, testing multiple database designs, and assessing different software, a relational database on all women mentioned in the Crónica de Castilla was generated. The completion of this database in Excel represents a combination of digital and traditional methods, since all entries were based on the close reading of the chronicle. Next to better-known individuals, this innovative database, named “FEMIber CrCast”, includes anonymous, non-documented, and non-identifiable (groups of) women, whose data is structured in different categories, from recorded names to death-related information. Besides determining categories and values applicable to most women in the work, values with special symbols and flag fields were added to indicate the probability, credibility, or quality of the recorded information. Whenever possible, Wikidata identifiers were incorporated for additional quality control. The database is stored on the open CORA.RDR repository: https://doi.org/10.34810/data1904. After a series of modifications and design improvements, it was published online as a user-friendly research and educational tool (https://femiber.upf.edu). According to Google Analytics, this interactive version, which also features various graphs, had over 670 international users in the first year.
In the following phase of the project, a different computation approach was chosen for the Livro de Linhagens do Deão to avoid methodological repetition. Despite its title, this genealogical work is not based on male ancestry, and its bilateral model confirms women’s relevance in most lineages. Following a training in social network analysis, a database that focused on kinship ties was designed. The data model was based and tested on representative samples, and the Nodegoat environment proved to be a suitable tool due to the possibility to combine spatial aspects with social network analysis. This non-linear way of “reading” of the work further pointed to the frequency and distribution of certain elements linked to people (for example, titles, childlessness, offices, etc. – all recorded as their attributes), whose exploration is currently in preparation.
Numerous challenges of these data-driven approaches, their analytical potential, and the generated graphs were discussed in a series of conference papers, seminars, and talks, an open access article from 2025, as well as in other outreach, mostly digital, formats. The modified data sets were also used in teaching and communication outreach activities, including two open workshops on digital literacy. The project’s quality and impact were further enhanced via discussions and exchanges during the two secondments (Fordham and Brown) and the non-academic placement at the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project went beyond the typical binaries and male-centered approaches to shed light on the underlying tendencies and patterns in women’s and gender-based aspects of these medieval Iberian works. By going against the incomplete and often biased representations, categories and values were carefully determined to highlight relevant gender-sensitive aspects and raise awareness about the need for this kind of research.
While the project operated against the background of traditional philology, the digital framework served as a proof of concept to expand the current scholarship and contribute to the internationalization and visibility of the Iberian medieval heritage. The heterogenous corpus – a Castilian chronicle and a Portuguese genealogical work – facilitated critical reflections on database design, data categorization, and tool suitability beyond the area of medieval Iberia, while the online storage of the database and its guidelines ensured transparency and reusability.
Further research paths have successfully been identified, and the project’s digital component has contributed to the competitiveness of the Humanities and its specific notion of ‘data’. However, the project’s potential is not limited to academic circles: The online materials and in-person activities have been used to discuss various topics and biases, such as marginalization, underrepresentation, and discrimination, whether identified in the past or still engrained in our societies. Finally, the project’s commercial feasibility still needs to be studied in detail.

The graph shows the distribution of women (as individuals and groups) in the Cronica de Castilla

Example of a search on the Femiber CrCast platform

The graph shows how women's religion in the Cronica de Castilla was determined (Religion flag field