Edition of the diplomatic collection of mediaeval Galician documents

This project consists of reading and transcribing mediaeval Galician documents. At present the project focuses on reading and transcribing sources from the Cistertian monastery of Santa María de Oia in Pontevedra. The monastery’s collection spans the years 1113 to 1698, but the project limits itself to the mediaeval period, hence to documents dating up to around 1500.

Most of the documents are housed at the Arquivo Histórico Nacional (national history archive), and consist of unbound parchments stored in folders nºs 1794 – 1850. In this archive there are also four files: nºs 5462, 5464, 5467 and 5473. All in all there are approximately 1288 documents on unbound parchments.

The first step was to read the unbound documents in order to complete a first reading of the whole mediaeval collection and create the data base. This is very important because it allows us to keep track of the documents and study them in terms of a variety of research criteria and to group documents that are from the same scribe, clergyman, king etc. Next we perform an initial transcription of the sources, then a revision to compare the data and styles of different scribes and to fill in doubtful readings.  This re-reading is not linear, since it consists of a continual revision of previously transcribed documents taking into account new data as they emerge with the transcription of new documents. In addition, we computerized the graphic elements and transferred relevant data from each document to our data base.

Furthermore we attempted to determine the geographical origin of each document in the collection, published by different authors, in order to fine-tune our readings while at the same time incorporating this information into a future edition of the corpus.