UBCO’s Dr. Francisco Peña is leading an international team that will translate and digitally preserve the General e grand estoria—the largest universal history written in Medieval Europe.
One of the world’s most unique and important texts—the General e grand estoria will soon be translated, analyzed and made widely available, thanks to a global endeavour led by a UBC Okanagan researcher.
Dr. Francisco Peña, Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, is leading a team of international scholars in the collaborative effort to translate and digitally preserve the General estoria (GE)—the largest universal history written in Medieval Europe.
The project was awarded more than $2.1 million through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant, announced today by the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions. It’s part of a larger funding announcement for Canadian university research that included $9 million for UBCO.
“While this is one of the world’s most unique and important texts, it is unfortunately not widely known,” says Dr. Peña. “Many relevant texts written in medieval Spain have disappeared. Through our efforts we hope to change that and preserve this valuable piece of literature forever.”
The GE was commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile, who ruled Spain from 1252 to 1284. It was an effort to record the entire history of man, from the origins of the world as narrated in the Bible up to the time the work was commissioned.
Written in Spanish, the GE is unique in several ways, explains Dr. Peña. It’s the first work of its type in a language other than Latin and it includes the social and cultural history of the world to that point in time, not just the political history. Also noteworthy is that the authors spanned multiple religions. While many texts of the time were commissioned and written by Christians alone, the GE’s authors included Christians, Muslims and Jews.
It totals more than 6,000 pages, and is an integral piece of Spain’s history.
Dr. Peña will oversee the project along with co-directors, Dr. Katie Brown from the University of Exeter in England and Dr. Francisco Gago-Jover from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The project team includes 55 scholars and practitioners from 18 partner organizations across Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Colombia and Tunisia.
“The text hasn’t been well understood to date because it’s impossible for a single scholar to tackle a project of this size and complexity,” says Dr. Peña, explaining it will be translated to suit a lay audience. “So, we’ve assembled this team from across the globe to tackle it together.”
They’ll be using a digital platform called Colabora, developed by Dr. Peña and colleagues in 2018 to transcribe, digitize, translate and annotate the original GE text. For this project, he hopes to train Colabora’s AI components to read the 13th century handwriting to speed up the document’s transcription.
The original text is housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, and part of the SSHRC funding will provide graduate students with experiential learning opportunities in Spain alongside the document.
“In the spirit of how the original text was written, we want to create a network of students from many countries and cultures and give them opportunities to work and study together at the same time. This is an invaluable opportunity for us to provide training and experience they can’t receive any other way,” says Dr. Peña.
The team also plans to create a series of additional materials to help lay audiences understand the original work, and will partner with libraries and school districts in North America, Europe and North Africa to help disseminate the information.
Connecting with a general audience is a huge component of the project.
“In the last few years, there’s been a mistrust of academic institutions—a perceived distancing of universities from non-university communities. We want to bridge that gap,” he says. “This document was written in the language of the people—there was an aim to reach as many of them as possible. We’re going to do exactly the same thing.”
The Canadian government’s willingness to support the work of preserving a Spanish document is also unique, notes Dr. Peña.
“I love that Canada has stepped up to do this for something that’s not Canadian. To help preserve history, reach people, and spread knowledge,” he says. “This may be a Spanish text, but the values—that’s what’s Canadian.”
