The work on the project included the reading of secondary literature (mainly during the first year), archival research and collection of relevant data, elaboration of the latter and dissemination through academic articles and conference papers. During the first year, the unforeseen discovery (in the archive of the Roman congregation, De Propaganda Fide) of unknown documents issued by institutions linked to the Custody and spread across Europe, confirmed and strengthened the initial hypothesis of the existence of a Franciscan network that facilitated mobility across the Mediterranean. The collection and the elaboration of the data was followed by the presentation of the research findings in workshops and conferences, among which the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, and the writing of a contribution to an edited volume: “Religious Orders, Networks and (Global?) Mobility”, in P. Nelles, R. Salzberg (eds.), “The Mechanics of Mobility in the Early Modern World”, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 (accepted). In parallel, the researcher also started the collection and analysis of data extracted from the sacramental books of Bethlehem (Archive of the Custody of the Holy Land, Jerusalem) and the construction of an on-line open-access database (presented at the conference “Monasteries in Digital Humanities”, Czestochowa, 2017). The project findings on migration within Palestine have been presented at international conferences and in a journal article currently under review. Besides migration, the research has also been fruitful with regard to the history of Catholic parishes in Palestine. Together with the mentor, Prof. Beat Kümin, the researcher wrote an article on parishes in a comparative perspective. In addition, the researcher wrote a contribution, on Franciscan parish life, mission and the local context, for an edited volume “An Economic integration: Franciscans in Semi-Rural Palestine (17th-Century)”, in B. Heyberger, C. Windler, et al. (eds.), Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia: Patterns of Localization, Routledge 2019 (Forthcoming).
During the two-year action, the researcher has also co-organized the “Sixteenth Warwick Symposium on Parish Research – Parish and Migration”, and one workshop (“Migration in Interdisciplinary Perspective”) with Prof. Beat Kümin and a workshop (“Refugees and Forced Migrations: Addressing New and Old Challenges”) with Prof. Marianna Fotaki.
Concerning the dissemination of the project findings to a non-specialist public, the researcher participated in in BBC4’s ‘Making History’ radio programme (10 July 2018) and wrote three pieces for non-academic journal and on-line platforms among which www.opendemocracy.net. One of the articles (“Migrants Have Crossed the Mediterranean for Centuries- But They Used to Head from North to South”, published on www.conversation.com/uk 26 June 2018) received 11,000 dowloads for the English version and 4,808 for the Spanish translation, and was republished in France and translated in Portuguese. In addition, the researcher and her mentor Prof. Beat Kümin organized a public engagement event: ‘Ideas Café: Parish and Migration in Past and Present’, in St. John the Baptist Church, Berkswell, UK (6 June 2018).
