Database

This project investigates the extent to which New Christians were immersed in material culture: from the extraordinary diversity of commodities and objects circulating across continents to the immense documentary record generated by their commercial, social, and legal activities.

New Christians were, in this sense, “clad in paper”, their material lives recorded across thousands of notarial acts, royal quittance letters, commercial contracts, and inquisitorial dossiers. Yet the paper trail they left behind, however immense, is also fragmentary. It is dispersed across archives, languages, territories, and documentary traditions, reflecting the inherently global character of the New Christian experience.

This dispersed and fragmentary source material makes it difficult to reconstruct the full range of New Christian commercial activity, commodity knowledge, and material life through conventional narrative methods alone. One of the ways in which this ERC project seeks to address this archival challenge is through the construction of an online database dedicated to New Christian materiality.

The MATERIA database seeks to register and systematize the commercial and material activities of New Christian agents, drawing on existing secondary literature, digitized primary sources, and the project’s original archival research. It brings together and translates qualitative historical information concerning mercantile activity, commodity flows, social mobility, and material culture into structured, queryable data.

The MATERIA database is currently being developed in collaboration with King’s Digital Lab. Further details about the database and its features will be announced in the near future.

In the meantime, if you have information relating to New Christian trade, commercial activity, commodity knowledge, or material culture that you believe may be relevant to the database, we would be very pleased to hear from you. Please contact the team through the Contact page.

All contributions will be acknowledged clearly and transparently.