Collecting, Curating, and Remembering in the Cathedral of Seville

Two singular manuscripts, the Libro Blanco and Libro de Dotaciones, from the Cathedral of Seville, were found to serve as a compact unit of information during a pivotal period in the Church's history. These diplomatic codices, created in the early 15th century, played a crucial role in reorganizing the economic and historical memory of the institution, paralleling the transformation of the old mosque-cathedral into a new Gothic church. The manuscripts were part of a massive project to contain, organize, and perpetuate vast amounts of information extracted from original documents in the Cathedral Archive. Every aspect of their material composition—parchment, format, text layout, writing—was meticulously defined to create a portable archive that ensured the longevity of historical memory.

Fernández, D. B. (2024). Collecting, Curating, and Remembering in the Cathedral of Seville. New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages, 60–76. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003181033-5