On March 7, 2025, the program 90 Segundos de Ciência aired an interview with Mário Farelo, professor of Medieval History at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Minho and integrated researcher at Lab2PT/IN2PAST, about a study with visitation records on Cistercian monasteries in Portugal that were not known.

 

The visitation was a control instrument that aimed to verify whether the rules that regulated people’s lives in the monastery were followed or not. The idea of ​​the study is to enhance this information, studying it, editing it, and converting the Latin texts that appear in this documentation for public enjoyment.
By studying these documents, it will be possible to understand what was going less well in these monasteries and to try to contextualize this information in order to, on the one hand, better understand the experiences within these communities at the end of the Middle Ages, and on the other hand, to value the information that these sources contain for the knowledge of the buildings themselves today.
Visits often contain information about the location of buildings and their state of conservation, data that can be very useful for archaeologists, historians, and museologists, for example, when using this information in guided tours at interpretation centers.

 

Available at: https://www.90segundosdeciencia.pt/episodes/ep-1965-mario-farelo/