Periodic Reporting for period 3 - VINCULUM (Entailing Perpetuity: Family, Power, Identity. The Social Agency of a Corporate Body(Southern Europe, 14th-17th Centuries))
Période du rapport: 2022-06-01 au 2023-11-30
VINCULUM project is about a key feature of the social fabric of Pre-modern societies of southern Europe and their colonial spaces: entails (morgadios, mayorazgos) and chantries. These institutions, analyzed jointly under the term of entailment, developed as a form of maintaining property within specific family formations, by creating a corporate body, administered by the chosen successors, in a horizon of perpetuity. The corporate body, which encompassed the living, the deceased, and the future family members, had enormous power. Anchored in the deep culturally-constructed figure of the founder, it regulated human relations within the family and outside it; it established specific relationships with property and the economy; it negotiated tradition and controlled change. The matrix of entailment organization far surpassed social solutions. It constituted a cultural phenomenon, almost genetic to society.
Despite its importance, it has not yet been studied deeply and extensively or theoretically reframed. VINCULUM aims at filling this void, by explaining how entailment became possible, how it functioned, and why it lasted for so many centuries. Building on the Portuguese-Iberian case, it proposes to study entailment as a diverse but pivotal practice, one embedded in law, aristocratic discourse, and kinship-based organization, and to carry out comprehensive analysis that explores this global nature. The research approach systematically breaks with traditional research frontiers: cases will extend from the 14th to 17th century in both continental and Atlantic spaces, and include both comparative perspectives and the study of later social reconfigurations. The project defined as its overall objectives:
- to carry out an exhaustive survey of the empirical material directly produced by entails in the territories considered.
- To explore comparative perspectives across space and time.
- to examine historiographical readings of the theme, especially around great topics such as lineage mutation, feudal property, the economic illiteracy of the nobility, the corporate paradigm of the Ancien Régime society.
- to follow theoretical and methodological perspectives from anthropological history, respecting phenomena of societal alterity, and considering entailment as an example of an embedded phenomenon.
- To value the achievements of archival science / the epistemology of the sources, signaling and imparting meaning to the mutations undergone by the empirical materials
Despite its importance, it has not yet been studied deeply and extensively or theoretically reframed. VINCULUM aims at filling this void, by explaining how entailment became possible, how it functioned, and why it lasted for so many centuries. Building on the Portuguese-Iberian case, it proposes to study entailment as a diverse but pivotal practice, one embedded in law, aristocratic discourse, and kinship-based organization, and to carry out comprehensive analysis that explores this global nature. The research approach systematically breaks with traditional research frontiers: cases will extend from the 14th to 17th century in both continental and Atlantic spaces, and include both comparative perspectives and the study of later social reconfigurations. The project defined as its overall objectives:
- to carry out an exhaustive survey of the empirical material directly produced by entails in the territories considered.
- To explore comparative perspectives across space and time.
- to examine historiographical readings of the theme, especially around great topics such as lineage mutation, feudal property, the economic illiteracy of the nobility, the corporate paradigm of the Ancien Régime society.
- to follow theoretical and methodological perspectives from anthropological history, respecting phenomena of societal alterity, and considering entailment as an example of an embedded phenomenon.
- To value the achievements of archival science / the epistemology of the sources, signaling and imparting meaning to the mutations undergone by the empirical materials
The research carried out so far followed the program foreseen for the first phase of the project: to build structured working materials that would allow carrying out the historical studies of the second phase. The set-up of the materials obeyed to an innovative principle –the treatment of sources as scientific work in itself, based on specific theoretical lines. Concepts from historical archivistics and information science were privileged for data gathering and treatment, and methodologies of documental diplomacy were used for the insertion of documents in the database.
The first task consisted in the construction of a large database gathering the entails founded between the 14th and 17th centuries in the territories under study. The second task was the study of the «Entailment Information System», that is, the set of institutions that produced the information acts making entailment function (comprising entails themselves, since the theoretical proposal of the project considered them institutional agents of a corporate nature).
These two outputs, although implying different research work, are totally interconnected, as the «information acts of the institutions» result in the documents to be inserted in the database; and the database will allow to understand the functioning of the system «in practice». The joint result of the two tasks will form the basis of a global vision of entailment – whose lack was considered in the project’s state of art a major obstacle for the correct perception of the historical problem. Although entails have produced an immense amount of documentation, its difficult archival retrieval and its complex historical interpretation, have only allowed for partial studies.
The construction of the database involved three tasks - locating the documentation in the archives; defining data insertion protocols; customizing software. The documentary information collected and processed reaches at this stage:
- 18.600 Documentary descriptions,
- 15.242 Authority records
- 4.372 Archival institutions/ entails.
This enormous amount of information will allow for the structuring of the historical studies in the second part of the project.
A third task consisted of science communication and outreaching scientific activities, in order to disseminate the investigations carried out and to reinforce the scientific and cultural importance of Historical research.
The first task consisted in the construction of a large database gathering the entails founded between the 14th and 17th centuries in the territories under study. The second task was the study of the «Entailment Information System», that is, the set of institutions that produced the information acts making entailment function (comprising entails themselves, since the theoretical proposal of the project considered them institutional agents of a corporate nature).
These two outputs, although implying different research work, are totally interconnected, as the «information acts of the institutions» result in the documents to be inserted in the database; and the database will allow to understand the functioning of the system «in practice». The joint result of the two tasks will form the basis of a global vision of entailment – whose lack was considered in the project’s state of art a major obstacle for the correct perception of the historical problem. Although entails have produced an immense amount of documentation, its difficult archival retrieval and its complex historical interpretation, have only allowed for partial studies.
The construction of the database involved three tasks - locating the documentation in the archives; defining data insertion protocols; customizing software. The documentary information collected and processed reaches at this stage:
- 18.600 Documentary descriptions,
- 15.242 Authority records
- 4.372 Archival institutions/ entails.
This enormous amount of information will allow for the structuring of the historical studies in the second part of the project.
A third task consisted of science communication and outreaching scientific activities, in order to disseminate the investigations carried out and to reinforce the scientific and cultural importance of Historical research.
Progressing beyond the state of the art and setting strong foundations for completing and surpassing the expected final results have been central motivations for VINCULUM’s team.
The documentary survey’s organization is strongly innovative as it is based in a thorough study of document-producing institutions. This methodology allowed for a deep archeology of the archives, bringing in significant amounts of dispersed or unknown documents. It included parameters of archival history, which made possible to locate documents more quickly, to recognize their dispersion, and to circumvent the effects of deficient description of archival records. The localization of the documentation was based on the «Entailment Information System Guide»: institutions producing information were identified and characterized; the way they transformed information into documents and these into archives was studied; the archives’ fate after the extinction of Ancient Regime institutions was traced.
The methodology followed for the treatment of documents and their insertion in the database is also highly innovative, a characteristic that springs from interdisciplinary bonds with archival science. Instead of privileging content and organizing data treatments that atomize the medium that transmits it, documentary transmission was respected and reproduced. Insertion of documents was done following diplomatic models. The problem of not losing historical contents’ data was resolved with indexing, using controlled vocabularies.
The documentary database supports two others, whose construction also followed innovative principles: Authority Records database, in which prosopographies are made as authority records; Archival Institutions database, which allows for the characterization of entails as entities producing documents and aggregating their producers, thus corresponding to the theoretical hypothesis central to the project - the entail as agency entity.
The study of the history of institutions, resulting on the «Entailment Information System Guide» was similarly carried out according to novel methodologies. The central theoretical advance lies in the conceptualization as a system of the information, of the acts carried out by the institutions acting in the historical context. This procedure significantly renews the traditional history of institutions by conferring it social dynamics and it is an important tool for the project’s database future use in the historical projects.
The documentary survey’s organization is strongly innovative as it is based in a thorough study of document-producing institutions. This methodology allowed for a deep archeology of the archives, bringing in significant amounts of dispersed or unknown documents. It included parameters of archival history, which made possible to locate documents more quickly, to recognize their dispersion, and to circumvent the effects of deficient description of archival records. The localization of the documentation was based on the «Entailment Information System Guide»: institutions producing information were identified and characterized; the way they transformed information into documents and these into archives was studied; the archives’ fate after the extinction of Ancient Regime institutions was traced.
The methodology followed for the treatment of documents and their insertion in the database is also highly innovative, a characteristic that springs from interdisciplinary bonds with archival science. Instead of privileging content and organizing data treatments that atomize the medium that transmits it, documentary transmission was respected and reproduced. Insertion of documents was done following diplomatic models. The problem of not losing historical contents’ data was resolved with indexing, using controlled vocabularies.
The documentary database supports two others, whose construction also followed innovative principles: Authority Records database, in which prosopographies are made as authority records; Archival Institutions database, which allows for the characterization of entails as entities producing documents and aggregating their producers, thus corresponding to the theoretical hypothesis central to the project - the entail as agency entity.
The study of the history of institutions, resulting on the «Entailment Information System Guide» was similarly carried out according to novel methodologies. The central theoretical advance lies in the conceptualization as a system of the information, of the acts carried out by the institutions acting in the historical context. This procedure significantly renews the traditional history of institutions by conferring it social dynamics and it is an important tool for the project’s database future use in the historical projects.