Introduction
The Becerro Galicano is a monastic cartulary that was compiled around the year 1195 in the famous Spanish abbey of San Millán de la Cogolla, in what is today Rioja province. The single volume in Caroline script, hence ‘Galicano’, contains some 750 documents ranging in date from 759 to 1194, as well as some twenty texts introduced into its end folios during the thirteenth century.
The Becerro Galicano is one of the most important sources for the study of Christian Spain between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Both the location of the monastery on the Castilian-Navarrese border and the vast scale of its demesne make the cartulary an outstanding source for the early history of both the kingdom of Pamplona and the county of Castile, and more generally for the lands and peoples of the Rioja, Navarre, Castile, Álava and Bizkaia over some four centuries.
With the few exceptions of some late additions, the language of the cartulary is Latin, but an evolved Latin which is much less conditioned by scribal practice than in other Western European regions. This explains the profound influence of early Castilian on the supposedly Latin text, to which is added an abundance of Basque names to form a singularly complex linguistic mix. In response to the additional challenges posed by such linguistic riches, to the traditional indices for vocabulary, place-names and personal-names, we have added a lemmatised index which allows the user to search for a term regardless of the form or spelling it has in the cartulary.
As well as via the indices and associated search tools, the user can access both high resolution images of the cartulary’s folios and the transcription of their contents. In this latter case, the transcription can be viewed in codicological order, thus following the cartulary’s own sequence and logic, or chronologically. Additionally, if the user opts for chronological order, the material can be ordered according to either the dates as they appear in the codex or using the critical dates which we have suggested for the two hundred or so texts that lack reliable dates. Furthermore, these three ways of ordering the cartulary contents –by folio, by codex date or by critical date- can be used to order the results of all searches.
Any queries should be directed to Contact Email, and similarly we would appreciate it if you could inform us of any erratas or imprecisions that you observe.
The digital edition of the Becerro Galicano is the result of a collaborative project bringing together a team from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) with researchers from the CILENGUA (Centro Internacional de Investigación de la Lengua Española). In addition, further collaboration has been provided by the Digital Humanities Department of King's College London, thanks to Paul Spence, as well as Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of the Basque Language, which has provided guidance with respect to the numerous Basque language elements that appear in the cartulary. The project has been co-financed by the University of the Basque Country, the Department of Education, Language policy and Culture of the Basque Government (through its through its research group IT536-10), the Department of Education, Culture and Tourism of the Government of La Rioja, and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through its Plan Nacional I+d+i (HAR2010-16368).
- The transcription used is by Fernando García Andreva (El Becerro Galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla. Edición y estudio, San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua, 2010) of CILENGUA – Universidad de La Rioja, and he has also been involved in the development of the digital edition. The few changes to the transcription are those required to adapt it to a digital edition.
- The original initiative, the general design of the digital edition, responsibility for Web development, the lemmatisation of the text, the creation of the indices and the setting of critical dates are all the work of David Peterson (UPV/EHU).
- Technical development and IT support have been provided by Josu Landa Ijurko (Dijitalidadea S.L.).
- Project direction: Francesca Tinti (Ikerbasque-UPV/EHU) and Juan José Larrea (UPV/EHU).
We also want to thank the following for their help: Jaione Aguirre, Urbano Espinosa, José Antonio Fernández Flórez, Juan José García González, Iván García Izquierdo, Rufino Gómez Villar, Roberto González de Viñaspre, José Ángel Lema, Jesús Lorenzo, Julen Manterola, Juan José Martín, Elena Martínez de Madina, José Antonio Munita Loinaz, Ernesto Pastor, Paquita Sáenz de Urturi, Patxi Salaberri, María Josefa Sanz Fuentes, Sonia Serna, Guillermo Tomás Faci, Rafa Varón and Roger Wright.
- The images of the Becerro Galicano are the property of the Fundación San Millán de la Cogolla.
- This digital editon has been developed following the principles of Copyleft and Free Access, and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.
To cite us please employ the following formula:
Becerro Galicano Digital Doc. X] (www.ehu.eus/galicano - accessed dd/mm/yyyy)
