A Memória dos Vínculos

Overview & Synopsis

Over the course of the Vinculum project, thousands of documents relating to the institution of entails and their administration have been consulted. Many of them are now included in the project’s database, which endeavours to virtually reconstruct the archives of these Ancien Régime institutions as far as possible. These sources have proved essential for a better understanding of entails; however, their usefulness goes far beyond this already vast subject. The aim of this anthology is to showcase these findings by collecting more than 700 excerpts from documents dating from the 14th to the 17th century and indexing them thematically, in order to make historians, students and the curious aware of the richness and potential of these sources for the study of various themes, demonstrating the importance of historical research and its analytical tools for understanding other times, territories and societies and putting these fragments of the past into dialogue with the present.