Papers by Elena Albarrán Fernández
Historia. Instituciones. Documentos, 2020
Los siglos XIII y XIV fueron una época de desarrollo de una intensa
actividad política y administ... more Los siglos XIII y XIV fueron una época de desarrollo de una intensa
actividad política y administrativa por parte de los monarcas castellanos.
Tomando como punto de partida el reinado de Alfonso X, Asturias fue objeto del ejercicio de dos particulares prerrogativas regias: la creación de nuevas pueblas y el nombramiento de notarios; enmarcadas ambas en un contexto de renacimiento urbano y de difusión del Ars notariae desde el norte de Italia. Mientras la monarquía castellano-leonesa trataba de blindar sus derechos y prerrogativas en un nuevo código legislativo, la Iglesia y la nobleza asturiana comprendieron la importancia del notariado público como instrumento de poder, generándose profundas tensiones jurisdiccionales. En este contexto, el notariado público se convirtió
en un instrumento indispensable por su condición de depositario de la fe pública, un elemento clave en el desarrollo de la vida económica, un eslabón entre el poder político y el pueblo, así como un testigo de la memoria de la sociedad.
CEUR-Workshop Proceedings, 2020
Comprehension of past events and its reconstruction is one of the tasks performed by historians. ... more Comprehension of past events and its reconstruction is one of the tasks performed by historians. With the introduction of computer-aided methods the way in which historians perform their work has been transformed. One of these inclusions is the Semantic Web which can act as an alternative for publication, conciliation, standardisation and integration. Asturian notaries public contracts are a valuable material to understand the society of this epoch, specially in the Middle Ages where a renovation process in the institution was taking place. Therefore, in this work we explore the transformation of TEI-based XML transcriptions of notarial contracts to RDF by means of an heterogeneous data mapping tool which can improve the mechanism to publish Linked Data from existing transcriptions. 3
Escritura, notariado y espacio urbano en la Corona de Castilla y Portugal (siglos XII-XVII), 2018
Las cláusulas penales son un elemento muy recurrente en la documentación notarial
bajomedieval. P... more Las cláusulas penales son un elemento muy recurrente en la documentación notarial
bajomedieval. Presentes en la tradición cancilleresca y en la documentación
privada anterior, la implantación del notariado público y su renovada praxis no
excluyeron de sus formularios el uso de cláusulas condenatorias. Con el paso del
tiempo, las cláusulas penales fueron adquiriendo tintes cada vez más complejos,
abandonando algunas expresiones por otras adaptadas a su tiempo, desarrollando
su formulación, y en definitiva buscando siempre el cumplimiento del contenido
del documento con las garantías que ofrecía la amenaza de un castigo.
Conference Presentations by Elena Albarrán Fernández
A TEI-Based model to encode notarial charters (Asturias, 1260-1350 ca .), 2019
The transformation of social, political and administrative models all along the Mediterranean med... more The transformation of social, political and administrative models all along the Mediterranean medieval cultures–Italy, French Midi, Christian Iberia–, made notaries public a powerful social agent. As part of a new cultural and laic social group, notaries acted as a bureaucratic link between the common people and the elites, allowing the access not only to writing, but also to legally valid instruments that would resist memory. Its nomination was disputed between the different authorities of the Castilian Crown –monarchy, Church and nobility–as an element of jurisdictional power.
The study is focused on the notarial institution and its documentary production from mid XIIIth to mid XIVth centuries. Most of these documents come from Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries established in Asturias–San Pelayo and San Vicente of Oviedo or Santa María of Belmonte are some of them–, but also from Oviedo’s Cathedral and some
relevant city councils back in medieval times. Nowadays, many of the documents that make up the corpus are still preserved in this northern region, while another important amount of them is stored at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, in Madrid. The dispersion of these documentary collections adds more difficulties to the task: in the best-case scenario,
there is already a digitised version of the document–e.g. in Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES), also accessible at Monasterium (MOM)–; if the first option is not available, the researchers have to go where the documents are preserved to proceed with their work. The foundations of this research project were established in 1986 at the VII Congress of
the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique (Sanz, 1989). From this moment on, studies about notarial documentary production and notarial institution have evolved. Research projects focusing on early stage notarial history share three common purposes: to trace the different phases in the implantation of a renewed institution, and to measure the gradual reception of the restored Roman Law and specific legislative works; to observe the transformation of documentary forms and check the increasing use of writing and written instruments; and to document the jurisdictional and political tensions for the control of notaries public. Nevertheless, the methodological approaches have evolved since then according to the needs of recent research projects. Larger documentary corpora, massive digital repositories or complex crossed queries are some of our current
assets to push diplomatics–and digital diplomatics– research further (De Paermentier, 2014). To achieve those objectives, the methodology developed attended to several aspects: on a historic-diplomatic basis, we have applied a TEI-based model–following the example led by the Charters Encoding Initiative (CEI)3 – attending to archival data, diplomatic features and socio-political aspects. Each manuscript has its own XML document, as the corpus is constructed with approximately 400 individual documents. The three main elements of our TEI-based model are: <fileDesc>, contains the information related to our thesis project and research group and the archival file sheet of each document; <profileDesc>, contains the abstract and the diplomatic data such as the actio, redactio, traditio or the datatio; and the <body>, contains the transcription of the document, where the element <seg> identifies each part of its diplomatic structure, using attributes such as @function, @type and @subtype. This mark-up model was conceived to apply a systematic analysis of the data, in order to
study the evolution of notarial documents in this early stage period. For example, the use and progressive loss of religious content in the formularies used by these first notaries public. Religious formulas can be found in the invocatio and spiritual penal clauses so, using XPath queries we have managed to: trace a chronological evolution of the invocatio
in our corpus, registering the maintenance and progressive loss of this kind of formulas through a century– strong presence of invocatio formulas between 1270 and 1320 –. We have noted nine different variants of the invocatio -from its latin form In nomine Domini, amen to a more evolved romance variant En el nomne de Dios e de la Virgen Santa María sua madre, amen-; from the 142 documents that contain an invocatio formula, we have identified the most recurrent juridical actions that make use of it– mostly sales, donations and avecindamientos (i.e., a neighborhood charter) –. In this work, we have exposed a mark-up system (based on TEI and CEI) which we are currently applying to extract, on a systematic basis, data from a wide range of documentary typologies. Furthermore, it can be used on other kind of documents such as the ones produced by pontifical and royal chancelleries. As future work, a more complex strategy of data analysis will be designed and applied. Our main purpose is to build a complete characterisation of the diplomatic tenor of the documents contained in our
corpus. It will serve as an experimental database to test different types of analysis on large-size corpora and to produce a long-lasting encoding model.
Talks by Elena Albarrán Fernández
La implantación del notariado público: casos y modelos. Seminario internacional de formación doctoral. 26 de noviembre de 2020., 2020
Recording voluntary jurisdiction in the late Middle Ages, 2019
Collaborative seminar organized by Falco Van der Schueren, Els de Paermentier and Dirk Heirbaut i... more Collaborative seminar organized by Falco Van der Schueren, Els de Paermentier and Dirk Heirbaut in Ghent on the 22nd November 2019. The point of my contribution was to explain the main purpose of my doctoral thesis: to analyze the role of notaries public in a high-fast changing society, and how the notarial acts reflects those changes.
El empleo de la documentación notarial está detrás de muchos de los avances acaecidos en la inves... more El empleo de la documentación notarial está detrás de muchos de los avances acaecidos en la investigación histórica en el último medio siglo. A la inmensidad de sus fondos se une la diversidad social de sus protagonistas, la variedad de los negocios que reflejan y la sistematicidad con que documentan los tratos y contratos que pasan ante ellos. De este modo, el documento notarial se convierte en fuente imprescindible para la historia económica y social. Y no se trata solo del notariado como élite de poder de los señoríos urbanos, que era su carácter definitorio en las primeras investigaciones, desarrolladas sobre todo en Italia. Con la profundización de los estudios se ha visto que la institución y sus documentos se extienden al mundo rural y al ámbito señorial, y se alargan hacia la Edad Moderna, con enorme riqueza de testimonios. El propósito de este seminario es contrastar los resultados de distintas investigaciones que han tratado su implantación y actividad en geografías y cronologías diversas, desde la península itálica a la ibérica, de las Islas Canarias al continente americano. En las ponencias se enfatizan particularmente las cuestiones de orden metodológico: cómo se documenta su implantación, de qué modo se expresa la nueva institución, en qué manera describe y conforma sus sociedades. Al incidir en estas cuestiones, se abre la puerta a la presentación de comunicaciones de doctorandos sobre investigaciones en curso, que ilustran la vitalidad y nuevas direcciones de esta línea de investigación.
Thesis Chapters by Elena Albarrán Fernández
Programa de doctorado en Investigaciones Humanísticas de la Universidad de Oviedo, 2021
Esta colección diplomática es el segundo tomo de la tesis doctoral titulada "La implantación de l... more Esta colección diplomática es el segundo tomo de la tesis doctoral titulada "La implantación de los notarios públicos del rey en Asturias (1260-1350 ca.)". En este volumen se presenta la edición de los documentos notariales que componen el corpus documental sobre el que se basa el estudio.
Programa de doctorado en Investigaciones Humanísticas de la Universidad de Oviedo, 2021
In this doctoral thesis we have addressed the implementation of the notaries public in Asturias, ... more In this doctoral thesis we have addressed the implementation of the notaries public in Asturias, after the legislative renewal promoted by King Alfonso X in the Crown of Castile, between the years 1260 and 1350.
After presenting a historiographical review on the subject, we propose a methodology based on Digital Humanities techniques, specifically the encoding of the diplomatic corpus and its metadata using the XML-TEI standard.
In the following chapters we address several topics: the historical and social contextualization of the notarial institution in Asturias, taking into account its relationship with the different jurisdictional powers in the region; the composition of the Asturian notarial offices based mainly on the subscriptions of notaries, excusadores and scribes, as well as the daily functioning of the notarial offices; we approach the diplomatic corpus from a material point of view, considering the volume of documents collected, the supports used, the writing and the language; we review the steps that constitutes the documentary iter, from the reception of the business to the issuance of the document; and, finally, we address the corpus by individually analyzing the different parts of the documentary content in each contractual typology, from verbal invocations to notarial subscriptions, with a special emphasis on the final clauses apparatus.
To conclude this thesis, we have tried to consider the different axes of what meant the implantation of a renovated, roman-like institution in a rural region with a strong documentary tradition. An institution that was quickly understood as a tool at the service of the jurisdictional powers. A renovation that meant the substitution of the council scribes by officials with an attributed public faith, but who knew how to make use of their predecessors as clerks or excusadores in their offices. A scenario in which the obligation to register documents, or use regulatory forms, took time to prevail over an already established practice.
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Papers by Elena Albarrán Fernández
actividad política y administrativa por parte de los monarcas castellanos.
Tomando como punto de partida el reinado de Alfonso X, Asturias fue objeto del ejercicio de dos particulares prerrogativas regias: la creación de nuevas pueblas y el nombramiento de notarios; enmarcadas ambas en un contexto de renacimiento urbano y de difusión del Ars notariae desde el norte de Italia. Mientras la monarquía castellano-leonesa trataba de blindar sus derechos y prerrogativas en un nuevo código legislativo, la Iglesia y la nobleza asturiana comprendieron la importancia del notariado público como instrumento de poder, generándose profundas tensiones jurisdiccionales. En este contexto, el notariado público se convirtió
en un instrumento indispensable por su condición de depositario de la fe pública, un elemento clave en el desarrollo de la vida económica, un eslabón entre el poder político y el pueblo, así como un testigo de la memoria de la sociedad.
bajomedieval. Presentes en la tradición cancilleresca y en la documentación
privada anterior, la implantación del notariado público y su renovada praxis no
excluyeron de sus formularios el uso de cláusulas condenatorias. Con el paso del
tiempo, las cláusulas penales fueron adquiriendo tintes cada vez más complejos,
abandonando algunas expresiones por otras adaptadas a su tiempo, desarrollando
su formulación, y en definitiva buscando siempre el cumplimiento del contenido
del documento con las garantías que ofrecía la amenaza de un castigo.
Conference Presentations by Elena Albarrán Fernández
The study is focused on the notarial institution and its documentary production from mid XIIIth to mid XIVth centuries. Most of these documents come from Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries established in Asturias–San Pelayo and San Vicente of Oviedo or Santa María of Belmonte are some of them–, but also from Oviedo’s Cathedral and some
relevant city councils back in medieval times. Nowadays, many of the documents that make up the corpus are still preserved in this northern region, while another important amount of them is stored at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, in Madrid. The dispersion of these documentary collections adds more difficulties to the task: in the best-case scenario,
there is already a digitised version of the document–e.g. in Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES), also accessible at Monasterium (MOM)–; if the first option is not available, the researchers have to go where the documents are preserved to proceed with their work. The foundations of this research project were established in 1986 at the VII Congress of
the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique (Sanz, 1989). From this moment on, studies about notarial documentary production and notarial institution have evolved. Research projects focusing on early stage notarial history share three common purposes: to trace the different phases in the implantation of a renewed institution, and to measure the gradual reception of the restored Roman Law and specific legislative works; to observe the transformation of documentary forms and check the increasing use of writing and written instruments; and to document the jurisdictional and political tensions for the control of notaries public. Nevertheless, the methodological approaches have evolved since then according to the needs of recent research projects. Larger documentary corpora, massive digital repositories or complex crossed queries are some of our current
assets to push diplomatics–and digital diplomatics– research further (De Paermentier, 2014). To achieve those objectives, the methodology developed attended to several aspects: on a historic-diplomatic basis, we have applied a TEI-based model–following the example led by the Charters Encoding Initiative (CEI)3 – attending to archival data, diplomatic features and socio-political aspects. Each manuscript has its own XML document, as the corpus is constructed with approximately 400 individual documents. The three main elements of our TEI-based model are: <fileDesc>, contains the information related to our thesis project and research group and the archival file sheet of each document; <profileDesc>, contains the abstract and the diplomatic data such as the actio, redactio, traditio or the datatio; and the <body>, contains the transcription of the document, where the element <seg> identifies each part of its diplomatic structure, using attributes such as @function, @type and @subtype. This mark-up model was conceived to apply a systematic analysis of the data, in order to
study the evolution of notarial documents in this early stage period. For example, the use and progressive loss of religious content in the formularies used by these first notaries public. Religious formulas can be found in the invocatio and spiritual penal clauses so, using XPath queries we have managed to: trace a chronological evolution of the invocatio
in our corpus, registering the maintenance and progressive loss of this kind of formulas through a century– strong presence of invocatio formulas between 1270 and 1320 –. We have noted nine different variants of the invocatio -from its latin form In nomine Domini, amen to a more evolved romance variant En el nomne de Dios e de la Virgen Santa María sua madre, amen-; from the 142 documents that contain an invocatio formula, we have identified the most recurrent juridical actions that make use of it– mostly sales, donations and avecindamientos (i.e., a neighborhood charter) –. In this work, we have exposed a mark-up system (based on TEI and CEI) which we are currently applying to extract, on a systematic basis, data from a wide range of documentary typologies. Furthermore, it can be used on other kind of documents such as the ones produced by pontifical and royal chancelleries. As future work, a more complex strategy of data analysis will be designed and applied. Our main purpose is to build a complete characterisation of the diplomatic tenor of the documents contained in our
corpus. It will serve as an experimental database to test different types of analysis on large-size corpora and to produce a long-lasting encoding model.
Talks by Elena Albarrán Fernández
Thesis Chapters by Elena Albarrán Fernández
After presenting a historiographical review on the subject, we propose a methodology based on Digital Humanities techniques, specifically the encoding of the diplomatic corpus and its metadata using the XML-TEI standard.
In the following chapters we address several topics: the historical and social contextualization of the notarial institution in Asturias, taking into account its relationship with the different jurisdictional powers in the region; the composition of the Asturian notarial offices based mainly on the subscriptions of notaries, excusadores and scribes, as well as the daily functioning of the notarial offices; we approach the diplomatic corpus from a material point of view, considering the volume of documents collected, the supports used, the writing and the language; we review the steps that constitutes the documentary iter, from the reception of the business to the issuance of the document; and, finally, we address the corpus by individually analyzing the different parts of the documentary content in each contractual typology, from verbal invocations to notarial subscriptions, with a special emphasis on the final clauses apparatus.
To conclude this thesis, we have tried to consider the different axes of what meant the implantation of a renovated, roman-like institution in a rural region with a strong documentary tradition. An institution that was quickly understood as a tool at the service of the jurisdictional powers. A renovation that meant the substitution of the council scribes by officials with an attributed public faith, but who knew how to make use of their predecessors as clerks or excusadores in their offices. A scenario in which the obligation to register documents, or use regulatory forms, took time to prevail over an already established practice.
actividad política y administrativa por parte de los monarcas castellanos.
Tomando como punto de partida el reinado de Alfonso X, Asturias fue objeto del ejercicio de dos particulares prerrogativas regias: la creación de nuevas pueblas y el nombramiento de notarios; enmarcadas ambas en un contexto de renacimiento urbano y de difusión del Ars notariae desde el norte de Italia. Mientras la monarquía castellano-leonesa trataba de blindar sus derechos y prerrogativas en un nuevo código legislativo, la Iglesia y la nobleza asturiana comprendieron la importancia del notariado público como instrumento de poder, generándose profundas tensiones jurisdiccionales. En este contexto, el notariado público se convirtió
en un instrumento indispensable por su condición de depositario de la fe pública, un elemento clave en el desarrollo de la vida económica, un eslabón entre el poder político y el pueblo, así como un testigo de la memoria de la sociedad.
bajomedieval. Presentes en la tradición cancilleresca y en la documentación
privada anterior, la implantación del notariado público y su renovada praxis no
excluyeron de sus formularios el uso de cláusulas condenatorias. Con el paso del
tiempo, las cláusulas penales fueron adquiriendo tintes cada vez más complejos,
abandonando algunas expresiones por otras adaptadas a su tiempo, desarrollando
su formulación, y en definitiva buscando siempre el cumplimiento del contenido
del documento con las garantías que ofrecía la amenaza de un castigo.
The study is focused on the notarial institution and its documentary production from mid XIIIth to mid XIVth centuries. Most of these documents come from Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries established in Asturias–San Pelayo and San Vicente of Oviedo or Santa María of Belmonte are some of them–, but also from Oviedo’s Cathedral and some
relevant city councils back in medieval times. Nowadays, many of the documents that make up the corpus are still preserved in this northern region, while another important amount of them is stored at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, in Madrid. The dispersion of these documentary collections adds more difficulties to the task: in the best-case scenario,
there is already a digitised version of the document–e.g. in Portal de Archivos Españoles (PARES), also accessible at Monasterium (MOM)–; if the first option is not available, the researchers have to go where the documents are preserved to proceed with their work. The foundations of this research project were established in 1986 at the VII Congress of
the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique (Sanz, 1989). From this moment on, studies about notarial documentary production and notarial institution have evolved. Research projects focusing on early stage notarial history share three common purposes: to trace the different phases in the implantation of a renewed institution, and to measure the gradual reception of the restored Roman Law and specific legislative works; to observe the transformation of documentary forms and check the increasing use of writing and written instruments; and to document the jurisdictional and political tensions for the control of notaries public. Nevertheless, the methodological approaches have evolved since then according to the needs of recent research projects. Larger documentary corpora, massive digital repositories or complex crossed queries are some of our current
assets to push diplomatics–and digital diplomatics– research further (De Paermentier, 2014). To achieve those objectives, the methodology developed attended to several aspects: on a historic-diplomatic basis, we have applied a TEI-based model–following the example led by the Charters Encoding Initiative (CEI)3 – attending to archival data, diplomatic features and socio-political aspects. Each manuscript has its own XML document, as the corpus is constructed with approximately 400 individual documents. The three main elements of our TEI-based model are: <fileDesc>, contains the information related to our thesis project and research group and the archival file sheet of each document; <profileDesc>, contains the abstract and the diplomatic data such as the actio, redactio, traditio or the datatio; and the <body>, contains the transcription of the document, where the element <seg> identifies each part of its diplomatic structure, using attributes such as @function, @type and @subtype. This mark-up model was conceived to apply a systematic analysis of the data, in order to
study the evolution of notarial documents in this early stage period. For example, the use and progressive loss of religious content in the formularies used by these first notaries public. Religious formulas can be found in the invocatio and spiritual penal clauses so, using XPath queries we have managed to: trace a chronological evolution of the invocatio
in our corpus, registering the maintenance and progressive loss of this kind of formulas through a century– strong presence of invocatio formulas between 1270 and 1320 –. We have noted nine different variants of the invocatio -from its latin form In nomine Domini, amen to a more evolved romance variant En el nomne de Dios e de la Virgen Santa María sua madre, amen-; from the 142 documents that contain an invocatio formula, we have identified the most recurrent juridical actions that make use of it– mostly sales, donations and avecindamientos (i.e., a neighborhood charter) –. In this work, we have exposed a mark-up system (based on TEI and CEI) which we are currently applying to extract, on a systematic basis, data from a wide range of documentary typologies. Furthermore, it can be used on other kind of documents such as the ones produced by pontifical and royal chancelleries. As future work, a more complex strategy of data analysis will be designed and applied. Our main purpose is to build a complete characterisation of the diplomatic tenor of the documents contained in our
corpus. It will serve as an experimental database to test different types of analysis on large-size corpora and to produce a long-lasting encoding model.
After presenting a historiographical review on the subject, we propose a methodology based on Digital Humanities techniques, specifically the encoding of the diplomatic corpus and its metadata using the XML-TEI standard.
In the following chapters we address several topics: the historical and social contextualization of the notarial institution in Asturias, taking into account its relationship with the different jurisdictional powers in the region; the composition of the Asturian notarial offices based mainly on the subscriptions of notaries, excusadores and scribes, as well as the daily functioning of the notarial offices; we approach the diplomatic corpus from a material point of view, considering the volume of documents collected, the supports used, the writing and the language; we review the steps that constitutes the documentary iter, from the reception of the business to the issuance of the document; and, finally, we address the corpus by individually analyzing the different parts of the documentary content in each contractual typology, from verbal invocations to notarial subscriptions, with a special emphasis on the final clauses apparatus.
To conclude this thesis, we have tried to consider the different axes of what meant the implantation of a renovated, roman-like institution in a rural region with a strong documentary tradition. An institution that was quickly understood as a tool at the service of the jurisdictional powers. A renovation that meant the substitution of the council scribes by officials with an attributed public faith, but who knew how to make use of their predecessors as clerks or excusadores in their offices. A scenario in which the obligation to register documents, or use regulatory forms, took time to prevail over an already established practice.