COMMEMORTIS – What survives after death? Parish communities and death commemoration strategies in the medieval city (completed)

(COMMEMORTIS – O que sobrevive depois da morte? Comunidades paroquiais e estratégias de comemoração dos mortos na cidade medieval, EXPL/HAR-HIS/0532/2021)

Project Coordinator: Maria Amélia Álvaro de Campos (PI) | Ana Isabel Sampaio Ribeiro (co-I)

Duration: 01.03.2022 – 29.02.2024

Funding: FCT – IC&DT projects in all scientific fields
EXPL 2021 History and Archaeology Evaluation Panel – 2021 

Value: €48.850

Is it possible to reconstruct a city’s parish communities from a computer-aided analysis of obituaries, wills and post mortem bequests that benefitted their churches? This issue is approached by combining a traditional topic in medieval European historiography – Death and the Economy of Salvation – and a modern, innovative methodology, specially designed for a social and prosopographical study of Historical and Microhistorical topics – the Timelink software. This information system processes personal data collected from historical sources. The project will be developed for 18 months, during which two of the nine medieval parishes of Coimbra will be analysed using this software. We will conduct training sessions, conferences, and scientific discussions to contextualise the case in the face of the parish networks uniting other towns in Portugal and Europe. The project’s plan and methodology are based on the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of the Digital Humanities (Thaller 2012; Granjon 2016), reflected in two angles: the development of data analysis infrastructure; and the digital distribution of the results on a public domain website and in the form of research articles.

Official website: https://commemortis.wixsite.com/my-site