Organized by the CU Mediterranean Studies Group and the Mediterranean Seminar, the 3rd Summer Skills Seminar gets underway on May 12th, 2020. Originally planned as an in-person event at CU Boulder, in the face of the present public health crisis the seminar was quickly reconfigured as an on-line remote learning experience. Far from putting a dent in the event, moving online has enabled the Seminar to accommodate more participants. Twenty-three faculty members and graduate students from twenty-one universities from around the world (including CU Boulder) have registered for this four-day course.
This year’s edition, “Introduction to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (documents in Latin to ca. 1350)” will be taught by Prof. Brian A. Catlos of Religious Studies at CU Boulder, who has done research at the ACA for the last twenty-five years. Over the course of four days of intensive collaborative learning, participants will be introduced to the collections of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon, and the fundamentals of reading and analyzing unedited Latin diplomatic (administrative) documents, as well as research techniques and document editing.
The Archive of the Crown of Aragon is one of the largest and most important medieval archives in Europe, with a volume and variety of documentation for the eleventh- to thirteenth centuries which is rivalled only by the Vatican, and includes hundreds of thousands of documents that have not been edited or catalogued in modern times. The Crown of Aragon was a major political entity which spanned the medieval Mediterranean (including parts of Italy, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean) and had substantial populations of Muslims and Jews. The archive’s documentation can be used to study a whole gamut of themes, including political and institutional history, economics, culture, art history, literary history, history of science, social history, legal history, and religious history.
The Summer Skills Seminar is another innovative program organized by the CU Mediterranean Studies Group through the Mediterranean Seminar. Based at CU Boulder and housed in the Department of Religious Studies, the Seminar is the leading initiative in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies, and has over 1,600 scholarly associates in over 40 countries.