Period: April 2014 – April 2015
Budget: 15 000€
Although seals have been used since ancient times with the triple and important function of identifying, validating and keeping something inviolable, a function still at play nowadays, care for their inventorying, preservation and study have not corresponded to what is desirable.
In Portugal there is no systematic survey which gives an account of the number of seals or their condition, or a survey that allows counting the losses incurred. A recent analysis of the seals prior to 1319 from the archives of the Cathedral Chapter of Coimbra stored at the National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT) points to almost 50% of missing seals and only 25% of the remaining considered to be in good condition (MORUJÃO, 2010). Given that this is one of the largest Portuguese seal collections, such numbers are an alarming indicator of the urgent need to safeguard the sigillographic heritage still existing in our country.
Adding to this unfortunate situation is the fact that in Portugal, unlike what happened in other European countries, no systematic casts of seals have been carried out, nor any sigillographic catalogues have been made. The only large cataloguing attempt in existence is the known work of Luís Gonzaga de Lancastre e Távora, Marquês de Abrantes, O estudo da sigilografia medieval portuguesa (Lisbon, 1983). This study concerns only a part of the existing medieval seals of the National Archive of Torre do Tombo and a restricted number of seal impressions and matrices from other sources. The study also presents a varied number of errors and inaccuracies, and does not comply with the international inventorying and cataloguing criteria defined since 1990 by the Vocabulaire International de la Sigillographie (Rome, 1990).
The rebirth and renewal of the sigillographic science that occurred a few decades ago by the hand of Michel Pastoureau gave a new boost to the study of these “small monuments”. In recent years and in various countries, seals have been the theme of major exhibitions, of multidisciplinary scientific meetings and research projects. In Portugal, the interest in the subject has been growing over the past two decades. One cannot study or disseminate, however, what one does not know exists or where to be found. Contact with seals has led many researchers to verifying the urgency that needs to be put on preserving the national sigillographic heritage, its inventorying, cataloguing and dissemination.
It is within this framework that the project “SIGILLVM: Corpus of Portuguese Seals” appears and that this first wide stage emerges, dedicated to inventorying, cataloguing and digitalising the Portuguese medieval secular ecclesiastical sigillography. This is the first stage of a larger work plan – SIGILLVM PORTVGALIAE ® – which aims, in the medium term, to broaden the inventoried sigillographic world to the entire Portuguese seals up to the end of the Ancien Régime.
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