In this volume dedicated to the books, rituals, and spaces of the monastery of Lorvão during medieval times and the early modern period, a study of its documentation could not be overlooked, especially within the framework of a relatively recent discipline that has experienced significant development during the current century. This is Historical Archival Science, which sits at the intersection of History and Archival Science and, among other topics, studies the transmission of written documents through the centuries, the archival organisation of the past, and the creation of finding aids. ² This paper focuses on two Early Modern inventories of muniments from the Cistercian nunnery of Santa Maria de Lorvão, the oldest known, which allow us to understand how its documentation was organised and transmitted to future generations. ³

The convent of Lorvão was the first female abbey of the Cistercian Order in Portugal. This obedience was adopted at the beginning of the thirteenth century, after several centuries of existence as a male community, first following one of the Hispanic monastic rules, then the Benedictine rule. ⁴ From then on, thanks to the patronage of Infanta Teresa, former Queen of León, to royal protection, and to the many people- especially noble ladies-who felt the appeal of Citeaux, Lorvão became an important abbey, with a vast estate whose maintenance and management required the existence of documents proving the nuns’ rights, which were kept in the monastery's archive. ⁵

Information about this archive during the Middle Ages is very scarce, as no inventory from that period survived. It was housed on the first floor of the tower of the monastic building, where it remained until some major works were carried out during the eighteenth century. This construction campaign not only completely changed the appearance of the monastery but also endowed it with a new space for keeping its documents. ⁶ The earliest known inventory dates from the sixteenth century and is preserved in the Torre do Tombo National Archive. ⁷ It is one of the manuscripts studied in this paper, along with another inventory produced at the beginning of the following century. ⁸

In 1543, the scholar Onofre Francisco, ⁹ procurator for the nuns in Coimbra, dedicated the result of his work of “report[ing] [on] the main titles of the archive” to the abbess Ana Coutinho ¹⁰ . He decided to undertake this task because he found that looking for the deeds of Lorvão was very “arduous,” for they were “poorly organised,” and it could take more than fifteen or twenty days to find a document. ¹¹ What is more, he mentions the disappearance and theft of documents, resulting in losses to the nuns. ¹²

In an attempt to resolve the situation, this scholar adopted a system of storage so simple, he says, that the deeds could be found by anyone, even by a nun “que mal ler saiba” (“who can hardly read”). ¹³ He also recommended that the monastery henceforth keep a record of the loans with the date, name of the borrower, and identification of the deeds taken, and that, when returned, the documents be quickly put back in their proper place. ¹⁴ In order to prevent any carelessness, the author even considers that a deposit, or pledge, in gold or silver, be demanded for the diplomas taken away. ¹⁵

The inventory resulting from his work is in a very good state of preservation. It is composed of 163 paper folios, most of which written by Onofre Francisco, although there are many additions. ¹⁶ Many pages were left blank, so that it could be updated. ¹⁷

The system designed by this scholar, based on the typology of the documents, was alphanumeric, combining a letter and a number. ¹⁸ The letter corresponded to the initial of the document type in question (donation, purchase, privilege, etc.); each typology was kept in separate cabinets or bags, which were themselves numbered (A1, A2, C1, C2, etc.) (Fig. 1). On the outside of each cabinet or bag, the numbers of the deeds kept within were listed. Additions could easily be made by creating more bags, with new or the same letters, and more numbers to identify the documents they contained. On the back of the deeds, a reference code was placed, which can still be seen on many of the documents, albeit sometimes very faded. ¹⁹ The summaries that accompany the reference codes were written in many different hands, varying from the one of the inventory itself; ²⁰ at present, it cannot yet be affirmed if they are contemporaneous.

Table 1 shows, in the first column, the nine letters that compose this inventory, corresponding to the initials of the 33 categories of deeds listed in the second column. The number of documents for each letter varies between 9 and 244, forming a total of 765 deeds, which seems a very small number compared with the known documentation from before the middle of the sixteenth century preserved in the fonds of Lorvão. ²¹ Onofre Francisco's inventory clearly does not cover all the existing documents at the time, as half a year later the new inventory would include more than double the muniments, including many more bulls than the nine registered by Francisco.

His inventory presents other problems besides incompletion, some of which can be deduced from a brief analysis of the categories considered. The categories estromento, in letter E, and stromento, in letter S, are two different spellings of the same word, instrumento, from the Latin instrumentum, a vague designation that, strictly speaking, can cover any type of document drawn up by a public notary. ²² Other categories also overlap, like transacção (= transaction), compra (= purchase) and escambo (= exchange), or contrato (= contract), prazo, emprazamento and aforamento (= lease).

Regarding this sixteenth century “alphabet book,” the author of the second inventory states that “it seemed [to him] even more confusing than the archive itself,” because “there are books containing several titles which could be registered under different letters,” ²³ and there was no way of finding the documents relating to a certain subject and place if one did not know to which typology they belonged. In his own words, “it would be difficult to find things relating to some land or property without knowing whether it was acquired by letter, donation, or will, or to learn everything about a thing and place.” ²⁴ Unfortunately, the system implemented by Onofre Francisco was not as effective as he had foreseen. Another organisation of the monastery’s muniments was needed, and that was carried out in the following century by the writer of the above-quoted lines, Sebastião de Torres de Almeida.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sebastião de Torres de Almeida oversaw the preparation of a record book with the demarcation of the monastery’s estate. ²⁵ Faced with many difficulties in finding the documents that would allow him to carry out his task, he decided to reorganise the archive of Lorvão. ²⁶ The same was being done in many other Cistercian houses: from the last third of the sixteenth century, many monasteries produced such registration books and cartularies, and for this purpose they had to prepare inventories. ²⁷ “The proper production of such instruments of control presuppose the previous organisation of the fonds; before completely or partially registering each document, these should be put in order.” ²⁸

The new arrangement of the archive started during the government of Leonor de Noronha, who was the first abbess in the new three-year rotation regime, between 1605 and 1608. ²⁹ However, the work was only completed in 1611 or 1612 and was dedicated to the then head, Maria da Silva, ³⁰ to whom the inventory is dedicated (Fig. 2). It is a manuscript on paper, mostly in good condition, comprising four unnumbered folios containing a preamble, 98 numbered folios with the inventory and a set of protocols to help the redaction of certain documents, ³¹ and another 20 unnumbered sheets containing indexes and, at the end, some very difficult if not impossible to read documents because of the ink soaked through.

Torres de Almeida conceived a very different organisation of the deeds, based on geographical and typological or thematic principles. As shown in Table 2, the documents were divided into eleven titles, corresponding to equivalent bags. These were organised by place name, following a logic of proximity to the monastery, from near to far. Each bag contains a variable number of bundles organised by subject or typology.

The contents of the first bag, concerning the village of Lorvão (Table. 3), will act as a sample for analysis. It was composed of nine bundles, with six to 45 charters each, adding up to 197 deeds in total. These were grouped according to their subject-for instance, bundle 1 contained the documents relating to the friars, to Infanta Teresa, and to the entry of the nuns in the monastery-or to their typology, such as bundles 3 and 4, which include papal bulls and apostolic privileges, or bundles 6 and 7, consisting of royal privileges.

By the end of this restructuring, the muniments had been arranged into 88 bundles, which all together counted 1600 documents, as shown in Table 2, above. The organisation established by Torres de Almeida proved to be so effective that it lasted until the monastery’s extinction, even earning praise from the celebrated nineteenth-century historian Alexandre Herculano, who specifically noted in his travel journal the “tidiness and immaculacy” of that archive. ³²

However, by the time he went to Lorvão, the monastery’s archive was no longer the same. The major construction campaign carried out in the convent buildings during the eighteenth century, including an immense structure for a new dormitory, forced the monastic archive to be relocated. The archive and the library were now installed in two large rooms next to each other (the larger with a fireplace, plus three small filing cabinets) on the first floor of the building which held the gatehouse and the infirmary. ³³

Nelson Correia Borges-who brought to light most of the information now available on the renovation of Lorvão-found, in the monastery's expense books, entries relating to the acquisition of wood, hardware, window-panes, and shelves for the archive between 1755 and the beginning of the nineteenth century. ³⁴ During this last century, the growing number of books and documents necessitated the expansion of the storage space, which probably justified the acquisition of the shelves recorded in the expense book.

The relocation of the archive implied changes in the organisation of the deeds, as testified by the marginal notes on the seventeenth-century inventory. On the first page of the manuscript, it is stated that “the order of this inventory has already been perverted” but “it still serves very well” ³⁵ (Fig. 3). On the left-hand side of the same page, it is explained that “there are no bags anymore,” only “the order of the bundles” was kept. ³⁶ These were divided into drawers, with the first containing not ten bundles, as prescribed, but only nine.

The most significant change, in fact, concerns the replacement of the eleven bags with six drawers, where the documentation was certainly now kept. Table 4 shows the correspondence between the Torres de Almeida system and the one established during the second half of the eighteenth century. It is unclear how the division of the ordens (“orders”) would materially correspond-single, first, second or third ordens might be boxes, folders or even dividers within the physical space of each drawer.

As the differences only concerned reference codes, a new inventory was not immediately produced. The seventeenth-century inventory was maintained with notes added in the margins referring to the changes and occasionally commenting on the contents of the bundle. ³⁷ For instance, besides the aforementioned comments, the first page contains a note in red, stating that missing documents were signalled in the margin with a correspondingly red f. This f appears on several pages of the inventory, such as on f. 6, by document no. 8 (“privilege by which the vicars will always be presented by the monastery” ³⁸ ) (Fig. 4), and on f. 19, by document no. 2 (“letter of confirmation from the church of Santo André” ³⁹ ), thereby noting their absence. Some other notes register the addition of documents to the bundles or the change of location of diplomas. ⁴⁰ Still others correct errors in the description, as can be seen on the margin of f. 1v, referring to a document summarized as a papal injunction for the brothers of Lorvão to leave the monastery to Infanta Teresa and move to the monastery of Pedroso (Fig. 5). ⁴¹ The comment informs that the description is wrong, as the parchment contains merely a statement by the Archbishop of Compostela about an order from the pope for the Abbot of Lorvão to be returned to the monastery and then excluded in the same way as the other monks.

This example shows how documents were presented in the new inventory, which, in fact, did not differ much from the practices of the previous “alphabet book.” ⁴² For each document, there is a short summary of its contents, generally without the names of the intervening parties. In the case above, there is an express reference to Infanta Teresa, but the pope and the Archbishop of Compostela are not named. The summaries of royal charters rarely identify the king, ⁴³ and never are the dates of the documents given-at most, the description will say whether it is a modern, a very old, or an ancient charter, ⁴⁴ without specifying the year or even the century.

Such an imprecise identification practice gave rise to situations such as that found on f. 16 (Fig. 6): the same entry includes twelve “old” leases and one modern, which can only be told apart by the number assigned to them on the bundle; further down the same page, five other rental contracts, both “ancient” and “modern,” are recorded together. If all the documents were properly stored, the charters in question would be easy to identify -if not, however, or if they indeed were missing, the elements contained in the summaries would not be enough to recover the information therein.

Many documents still display on their back the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century’s reference codes. Figures 7 and 8 show two examples which illustrate how these codes were presented.

In each case, the reference code is accompanied by the name of the place to which the deed relates and a description, different from the one in the inventory. ⁴⁵ Below the description is the number of the bundle, and above it the order number. These are the seventeenth-century elements, which do not include the title nor the bag where that bundle was stored. The other elements are the number of the drawer and that of the charter inside, which correspond to the changes made during the eighteenth century.

It was said above that the restructuring by Sebastião de Torres de Almeida and the eighteenth-century organisation of the drawers were maintained until the monastery’s extinction. In fact, both survived well beyond that. The Liberal Revolution of 1820 put an end to the Ancien Régime in Portugal, and following that religious orders were extinguished by decree in 1834. ⁴⁶ Their archives were incorporated into the Torre do Tombo Archive, ⁴⁷ which, in the meantime, had been transformed from a royal archive into a national one, gathering fonds from all over the country. ⁴⁸ In the face of this immense mass of documents, with few people to organise them, it was decided to gather a selection considered to be the most important or significant from within the different fonds into one collection, without consideration for the basic archival principles of provenance and respect des fonds. Thus, the Colecção Especial (Special Collection) was created, which includes pontifical and apostolic documents, royal and ecclesiastical charters, and private deeds. ⁴⁹

At first, this collection encompassed only documentation from male monasteries. The female communities had not been immediately extinguished, instead being barred from taking in new nuns. As the last nuns passed away, those communities closed their doors and their muniments were incorporated into a central archive. The first documents from Lorvão entered the custody of the State in the 1860s, divided among several institutions, including the Portuguese National Library. ⁵⁰ In 1912, two years after the establishment of the Republican regime in Portugal, the deeds kept in the National Library were taken to the Torre do Tombo National Archive and became part of the Colecção Especial. From 1939, thanks to the pioneering work by Rui de Azevedo, an immense task began, aiming to reintegrate the documents from this collection into their original fonds. ⁵¹ Today, several bundles of documents from Lorvão are still part of that collection; there are, however six drawers organised by Torres de Almeida, and a series of thirty other bundles whose origin has not yet been analysed. ⁵² As seen, the fonds of this monastery are immense, and studying the reference codes on the back of the documents will require the work of a team.

Torres de Almeida thought so too and relied on the collaboration of two nuns, Sister Maria de Mendonça and Sister Isabel de Noronha, who held the offices of bolseiras (bursars) and cartorárias (archivists). ⁵³ The specific tasks they carried out are unknown, but it is reasonable to assume that they participated in collecting, ordering, and organising the documents, as well as in their accommodation and in raising awareness among the community of the need to keep the archive orderly and the deeds duly safeguarded. Some casings of seals and parchments dating back to the Early Modern Period have survived until this day. That is the case of a letter on parchment referring to Infanta Teresa, the patron of Lorvão, which is rolled around a wooden cylinder lined with red silk, and then wrapped in a piece of the same fabric. ⁵⁴ To protect seals, cloth bags were made, some simple, ⁵⁵ others more sophisticated, such as one in the shape of a small shoe decorated with tiny beads on the top that preserves what is left of a royal seal. ⁵⁶

Looking at these casings, it is difficult not to speculate that they were made by feminine hands, namely those of the nuns, not necessarily the aforementioned sisters, but others who dedicated their “talent and curiosity” exclusively to the archive, as Torres de Almeida had recommended. ⁵⁷ The data collected by Nelson Correia Borges on the cartorárias of Lorvão shows that the first nuns known to exercise this function were the two who collaborated in the organisation of the archive. ⁵⁸ About these women, it is known that Maria de Mendonça was elected abbess for three years in 1616, ⁵⁹ and that Isabel de Noronha died in 1644, having held the office of prioress for several years, and declining the superior office due to her humility. ⁶⁰

Two more archivist-nuns are known for the seventeenth century. In 1617, Sister Madalena de Vasconcelos e Silveira, born around 1584, ⁶¹ wrote a report on the opening of the tomb of Infanta Teresa, in which she reveals a great facility in writing and even some literary skill. ⁶² She was probably followed by Sister Isabel de Melo, who held this charge for forty years and used the information from the documents to prepare an unfortunately lost chronicle or history of the monastery. ⁶³

Six nuns are known to have been in charge of the muniment collection during the eighteenth century. Since the position was often held for long periods of time, it is likely the list-shown in Table 5-is complete. ⁶⁴ The information on these women is very uneven, ranging from the mere name and a date when they were in charge to other positions held, their age, the date of their death, or even some character traits. As the table shows, several of these nuns held different responsibilities throughout their lives in the monastery: keeper of the granary, sacristan, mordoma, mistress, and, in the case of two of them, abbess. One of the nuns is said to have been a scribe and had a special talent for playing the organ and teaching plainchant. The documents show that Sister Maria Caetana Francisca de Almeida, who died in 1777, was cartorária (registrar) for many years and copied and corrected musical manuscripts. Her name appears linked to the commission of a new index of the monastic documents, which was carried out not by a nun, but by a graduate. ⁶⁵ Six years later, in 1783, another cartorária, Sister Mónica Isabel de Melo Corte Real, died, to whose zeal the good order reigning in the archive was ascribed, according to the nuns’ obituary. ⁶⁶

The last archivist-nun mentioned by Nelson Correia Borges is Joana Delfina de Albuquerque de Lemos e Vasconcelos, who took the office in the first decades of the nineteenth century and produced an impressive account of what happened in the monastery during the Napoleonic invasions. ⁷⁴

Throughout this paper, we have analysed the two oldest inventories of the documents from the convent of Lorvão. We examined the reasons for their creation, their organisation, why it was necessary to produce a new one half a century after the first, and the long lifespan it was intended to enjoy.

We also sought to identify the individuals responsible for compiling these catalogues-always men-and the nuns who worked under their orders or whose duties involved the custody of the documentation. The names of several of these archivist-nuns have survived to the present day, and we searched for information about them.

These women, as well as others whose names are unknown, preserved the memory of this monastic house by taking care of its archive muniments. This memory has also been kept to the present day by the inventories analysed here, which were fundamental guides to finding the right path in the labyrinth of this archive.

Hopefully, this work will inspire new studies in Historical Archival Science that may be able to reconstitute the contents of this monastery’s archive, analyse its losses, and virtually restore the organisation it held for several centuries.