Scripta manent

The Writings Remain (Scripta manent)

Scripta manent (“The Writings Remain”) is the name of a research project funded by the Spanish National R+D Plan (PID2020-116104RB-I00). It is also, to a large extent, an evolution of earlier projects.
Coordinated by Cristina Jular Pérez-Alfaro (IH-CCHS, CSIC), its objectives consistently promote a collective and plural research culture, encouraging the creation and use of digital tools and the dissemination of research to wider audiences.
The project’s open lectures pursue these goals, offering alternatives—including forms of self-training—in the writing, reading, and commentary of medieval texts.

The Scripta manent database draws from historical documents, providing full-text versions, links to digitized copies in PARES, and a carefully curated record of scribes, notaries, and the occasional signatory.

To develop its digital platform, the project has benefited from collaboration with
Professors Ana Isabel Carrasco (UCM), Gonzalo Viñuales (URJC), and M. Antonietta Russo (UNIPA), as well as recent PhDs Marta Vírseda and Raúl Villagrasa-Elías, and graduate students from various master’s programs at UCM, UAM, and UM who have carried out research alongside the team (Beatriz Benito, Celia Castro, Daniel Cristóbal, Cristina Pastor, Graciano León, and Ubaldo Villarejo).

A team of web design and development professionals has also been involved since the project’s inception.
Further details on its purpose, focus, team, and ongoing results are available at
www.scriptamanent.info.

In Scripta manent, the project explores what lies behind the preservation of papers
within a noble archive—the purposes, reasons, interests, and motivations. Above all, it seeks to reveal the people involved in the creation and circulation of information,
together with the resulting acts of writing. It asks: who writes, signs, validates, reads,
annotates, fulfills, corrects, organizes, searches for documents, moves them, lends them, manipulates them, falsifies them, tears them, burns them, preserves them? In short, who generates, appears in, and acts through a medieval charter?

It delves into the world of friends, relatives, and vassals who formed multipurpose,
multifunctional social networks in which writing was intertwined with commerce,
inheritance, lordship, and politics—a tool of power and a sustaining core that social
historians continue to unravel.

Scripta manent in HILAME

The collaboration between Scripta manent and HILAME has produced a fruitful
convergence of shared interests, making the two research projects and their databases
interoperable and complementary. Contexts, places, persons, factoids, relationships,
sources, and chronology are key criteria common to both.

On the website www.scriptamanent.info, each charter is presented in full, while Scripta
manent within HILAME offers its disaggregated components as individual records.
The scientific dialogue between the two teams has a long history. Researchers Cristina
Jular Pérez-Alfaro, José Ramón Díaz de Durana, Arsenio Dacosta, Agurtzane Paz,
and other members of the research and design teams have collaborated through
publications, conferences, and academic initiatives aimed at developing structures that
enhance the use of cultural heritage and optimize the impact of publicly funded
research.