A Summer Skills Seminar on Reading Archival Latin is being organized by the Mediterranean Seminar for Summer 2022.

Graduate students and researchers interested in learning to read Latin manuscripts are encouraged to apply for this seminar.

The Mediterranean Seminar announcement reads:

The Summer Skills Seminar,  “Reading Archival Latin” will be held via Zoom from Friday, 27 May, and Tuesday to Thursday, 31 May to 2 June 2022 from 10am to noon and 1–3pm MDT.

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 will focus on the Latin-language documentation (from the eleventh to the mid-fourteenth centuries) in the archive’s collections.

This four-day intensive skills seminar will focus 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 will include: 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 are 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.