Few social phenomena were as important to pre-modern societies in southern Europe as entails (morgadios, chantries). These institutions, which constitute the object of study of the VINCULUM project and which are jointly analysed under the rubric of entailment, developed as a way of maintaining property within particular family formations, through the creation of a legal entity administered by successors specifically chosen for the purpose, in perpetuity.
The VINCULUM INFORMATION SYSTEM GUIDE (VISG), which is presented here in its digital version, aims to reconstruct the institutional, administrative, and information production system created by the practice of entailment between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, both internally and externally. It is divided into two main parts: the design of the institutional network, and the forms of information production, document creation, and establishment of archives.
In this product of subproject 1 of the VINCULUM project, the basic research problem involves reversing current thinking about archives related to entails, starting with historical archives as we know them today and asking “Where did they come from? Why and how?”. It is thus aligned with the most recent theoretical rethinking of the role of “sources” in the writing of History, which has come to underline that all archival documents, before becoming that, were documents of their own time; and they were also that to the extent that, according to the formulations of Archival and Information Science, the informational act precedes the “documentalization” and the document.
In a conception of the organization and use of documents that aims to respect the structure of information and document production, it is essential to know the institutions that produced that information and how they operated in administrative terms. It is then essential to describe the documents in their entirety, and to trace the legal boundaries that circumscribed the existence of entails.
Thus, the VISG has been organised into three core sections, which allow for an in-depth understanding of the multiple aspects underlying the information system of entails:
Institutions that produced, received, and/or preserved information about entails, namely the crown, the Church, and the entails themselves;
Documents produced by entailment, namely the document types identified and their analysis;
Civil and ecclesiastical legislation that regulated the functioning of entails across the centuries;
These are joined by sections dedicated to the critical apparatus, including an extended presentation of the main archival information repositories of the project.
Bibliographical references, sources, and working tools used in the preparation of the texts of the VINCULUM Information System Guide;
Archives—concerns the documentary collections where information on entailment was kept, namely those considered most relevant for the preparation of the VINCULUM Information System Guide. In-depth studies on the state of conservation and description of the main information repositories are available, which had to be carried out to orient the team’s research.
The different parts of VISG complement each other, and digital cross-referencing is foreseen in its final version. A summary of the general operation of the system is still being prepared and will be made available at the same time.
Analysis of VISG should be complemented with the consultation of the Entails Database, another output of subproject 1 of the VINCULUM project, available at https://www.vinculum-database.fcsh.unl.pt/. In turn, a fuller understanding and better appreciation of the Database requires the use of VISG.