Preface

Summary

It is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the whole team participating in this project, we present The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes, the first complete English translation of a set of works of primary importance for the history of Western Europe at the end of the 14th century. On opening this first volume, it will not have escaped the reader's attention that this is the result of the collaborative initiative of a group of people and funding institutions. Without the support of every single one of them the present edition of Fernão Lopes's chronicles in English would not have been possible.

This publication also represents a long-deserved act of justice towards ‘the father of Portuguese historiography’, one of the major chroniclers of medieval Europe, and yet scarcely known outside his country of origin. The joy and satisfaction of making his oeuvre available to an international readership rest in the knowledge that it answers a need often expressed by colleagues wishing to reference Lopes's work, fundamentally for research but also for teaching courses in Medieval Studies in universities outside Portugal and Brazil. In fact, this is how the idea of the present translation project started.

It all began in 2005, when a group of Iberian medievalists attending a session moderated by Professor María Bullón-Fernández, at the International Medieval Congress, in Kalamazoo, became aware of my research on Lopes's chronicles, especially the characterisation of female personalities as part of his narrative strategy. These colleagues lamented the fact that, apart from an anthology dedicated to the presence of the English in Portugal, there was no full translation of Lopes's extant works, and speculated as to when one could be expected. None was being prepared at the time. What is more, publishers in the US had refused book proposals with studies on Fernão Lopes because, as his chronicles were not available in English, in their opinion, such a circumstance seriously curtailed the interest of their readership, unable to make use of the primary source in its original Portuguese. Action was therefore called for.

On my return from the congress, I consulted colleagues who, like me, had a keen interest in Medieval Studies combined with many years of experience in teaching and working on translation.