DEMALPS studies late medieval mountain areas as the cradle of original political experiments, inspired by values and practices of self-governance. The focus of the project is on the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Alps, a broad territory (including modern French, Italian and Swiss regions), densely populated at the time, which saw unprecedented political unrest and experimentation with institutions, practices and types of registration. This area was marked by numerous efforts at, and some successes in, establishing collective governments, autonomous from the power of princes and lords. This branch of the Alps is characterised by an unparalleled abundance of exceptional sources for investigating this phenomenon: the records of council proceedings, which reported the local assemblies’ composition, debates, and decisions over time; the privileges and statutes, which shed light on the transactional relationship between communities and their lords; notarial and trial records, which document the more daily and quiet agency of ordinary inhabitants, including women. This rich corpus of sources, mostly scattered across more than a hundred local archives, offers an extraordinary insight into the Alpine inhabitants’ political ideals and practices, highlighting the various forms of collective action and participation in local affairs. To explore such a large and diverse region, DEMALPS adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining medieval history, digital humanities, diplomatics and archival science.
The project addresses several main questions. How did institutional politics evolve in mountain communities? Who could take part in decision making? What topics were at the centre of the communities’ attention? What constituted the fabric of political life, not only within councils, but also in daily conflicts and negotiations between denizens, and with superior authorities? How much of these practices were registered, and how? Finally, what were the specificities of mountain communities in the broader European context?
To answer these questions, the project provides innovative diplomatic and archival analysis of Alpine sources in comparative perspective. To this end, DEMALPS proposes to be the first native digital project specifically designed for collaborative work and sharing data in medieval history on this scale. All data (archival descriptions, pictures of documents, partial transcriptions, spatial and network visualizations) will be made publicly available online during and after the project. The hypothesis, case-studies and analytical research will also be made available on the website and on open-access platforms. Following the FAIR principles of digital humanities research (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), any researcher will be able to access and use the database, even after the end of the project.
DEMALPS thus aims to offer the scholarly community not only a new view of politics in late medieval Europe as they transformed into the modern institutions we know today, but also a research instrument to carry out further studies.
