Will it be somehow possible to configure pre-modern kinship-based corporate bodies and dead legal personae as interlocutors of the enquiries, in order to listen to the entails’ voices through the shadows of modernity’s discourse? To grasp the vision of both the founder, the heir, and the excluded; to pay attention to the laity’s secular fight to care for their own dead and to control kinship, its main form of institutional structuring, against the Church’s efforts to inhibit and control?

Globally, will the usage of such perspectives allow for a historical analysis less constrained by presentism or evolutionism, respecting alterity while also preventing exoticism?

Finally, can these perspectives help empower medievalists and modernist historians in their capabilities to contribute to theoretical work in the Social Sciences?

Entailment has so far been studied either from one-sided perspectives (legal, social, cultural) that play down its wholeness, or from the point of view of local monographs that scarcely problematize the broader issues. Only by considering the whole can the phenomenon be understood, the more so because the autonomy of the spheres of politics, economy, society, religion, etc., corresponds to an epistemological paradigm belonging to modern societies. Departing from the Portuguese-Iberian case, VINCULUM proposes to study ‘entailment’ as a diverse but pivotal practice, one embedded in law, aristocratic discourse, and kinship-based organization, and to craft a definition that takes into account this global nature.

The research aims also at breaking temporal and spatial boundaries traditional in academic research, which prevent a more accurate perception of social change (medieval / modern, the Continent / Atlantic space; medieval history / history of maritime expansion / modern (continental) history. By refusing such conventional barriers, VINCULUM intends to observe, in the long run, how entail institutions came to settle in society, slowly and progressively replacing forms of egalitarian heritage division and predominantly horizontal family structures.

The conceptualization of entails as corporate bodies endowed with social agency aims to respect its fundamental institutional nature and to prevent the fragmentation of its components, in line with the experimental concept and with the theoretical proposal of the project.

Entailment provided a brand for the group that lived around the entails – seat, name, symbols, internal norms created to govern internal and external relations, a script and legal forms for using wealth and for the prevention of its loss. It was reproduction-oriented. It embodied the model par excellence of nobility and as such ruled over the way to maintain or achieve it.

To understand this objective, VINCULUM will analyse entails’ basic components, which functioned together to achieve the institution’s aim: structuring a specific kind of family, maintaining or gaining power, lasting perpetually around the same essential origin.

The central structure of the research program is designed around what are defined as the central components of the agency of the entailment corporate body – kinship, power, identity – in order to propose a new concept for the phenomenon.

The images on this website are not “historically themed” – on purpose. Instead, we have chosen modern and abstract graphic elements that evoke in images the historiographic core of the project: to theorize an important historical phenomenon by developing a set of hypotheses and reaching abstract, general and interpretative answers. While we seek to deepen knowledge of historical particulars, we seek to transcend monographic research as an end in itself.

In a modest way, VINCULUM thus pays homage to and wishes to follow the approach of the “Histoire-problème”, as formulated by one the most innovative groups in the history of the historiographic thought, the «École des Annales». This group’s leading figure, the medievalist Marc Bloch, has inspired many generations of students to become historians through his book Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien. This inquisitive approach to reality, through scientific thought, is, after all, at the core of the ERC existence.