Del archivo al catálogo: herramientas y procesos para la recuperación de hagiografías femeninas

This poster introduces the "Catalogue of Living Saints", a wiki catalogue that collects a corpus of lives of Castilian charismatic women who acquired reputations for holiness and were influential in religious life as well as in the politics of their time (1400-1550). The collected lives appeared in a diversity of sources: manuscripts of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, including conventual books and compendia containing lives of saints (such as flos sanctorum), handwritten and printed chronicles of religious orders in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile, among other works. Thus, the Catalogue recovers several texts that have never been printed before (and that in most cases were never edited independently) and makes them available to academic researchers as well as non-specialized public (with different types of interest, whether religious, historical or cultural). This digital catalogue also provides the data included in the database as well as the geolocation, two additional features created specifically to provide a better and more accessible understanding of the phenomenon. Specifically, they help us to understand the different proposed hagiographical models and their performative shape and spatial distribution of power. 

The idea of creating this Catalogue resulted from an initial project funded by the Spanish government, The Construction of Female Sanctity and Visionary Discourse (15th-17th Centuries): Analysis and Recovery of Conventual Literature (2013–2015). This project was followed by a second (2016-2019), The Emergence of Female Spiritual Authority in Castile, and a third, entitled Catalogue of Living Saints (1400-1550): Towards a Complete Corpus of a Female Hagiographic Model (2020-2024), also funded by the Spanish government.