This Saturday, June 15th, will take place the public presentation of the book “Mesteres e Mesteirais de Guimarães: Sécs. XIV e XV. Corpus documental” in Pousada de Santa Marinha da Costa in Guimarães, part of the V Jornadas Afonsinas Program. This presentation will be carried out by the authors, Doctor Arnaldo Melo and Doctor Aires Gomes Fernandes.

This publication is part of the Medcrafts2 project, on the regulation of masters in Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of which I was the Principal Investigator. A project funded by FCT and developed between 2018 and 2022, with the participation of a plethora of medievalist historians from six portuguese universities, as well as international consultants, bringing together researchers from several generations and which allowed us to develop a systematic and joint research on the medieval masters in several Portuguese cities, such as Guimarães. This project resulted in a varied scientific production, including presentations at several international scientific meetings and several published studies, most of which were gathered in the book Regulation of Masters in Portugal at the end of the Middle Ages, in 3 volumes. The issue of facilitating access to existing documentary sources on this theme and chronology has always proved to be an essential dimension since the beginning of the project and, in this sense, it was also a concern and objectives of the project to proceed with the selection and publication of sources with relevance to the study of the masters, although not exhausting in it, since they are documents with information of great thematic scope. It also corresponds to the dimension of knowledge transfer to society, inherent to the Medcrafts project. Thus, through this book, which aims to select, compile and publish these documentary sources, transcribed in full, it becomes possible, for a wide audience, to access these documents, which can be useful for various research themes and the search for knowledge and information. These are documents that have hitherto been scattered, some of which have already been published but in different editions, sometimes only in summarized or incomplete form, while many others remained only existing in the originals preserved in the archives.

(Excerpt of  “Apresentação” chapter, Arnaldo Melo, p.31).