B.C.-led team translating medieval Europe's 'largest' universal historical text

A unique and expansive 13th-century text that set out to chronicle the history of humankind is being translated and analyzed for the first time, with a University of British Columbia Okanagan (UBCO) professor spearheading the international effort.

The General e grand estoria (GE), commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile during his reign from 1252 to 1284, is considered the first universal history written in a language other than Latin — Old Spanish — and is said to include the social and cultural history of the world to that point in time.

In a news release, UBCO described the text as the "largest universal history written in Medieval Europe," spanning more than 6,000 pages. It is currently housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid.

With more than $2.1 million in federal funding through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, a global team of 55 researchers across 18 institutions, led by UBCO professor Francisco Peña, is now translating and digitally preserving the work.

Peña says the historical text has been little known to people outside of some academic circles. 

"Most of Spain has never heard about it and I believe across Europe it is not that well known," he told CBC News.

"Many relevant texts written in medieval Spain have disappeared. Through our efforts, we hope to change that and preserve this valuable piece of literature forever," he said in the UBCO news release.

What makes it "very interesting," says Peña, is that unlike most texts of its time, which were typically authored solely by Christians, the GE's authors included Christians, Muslims and Jews.

He says the nearly 800-year-old manuscript offers a reminder of what's possible when people set aside their differences to pursue shared knowledge.

"Christianity, Islam and Judaism, it seems like we are getting farther and farther from each other," he told CBC. "Why, in the time of so much knowledge, does it feel like we're going backwards?"

For Peña, the text offers a lesson in shared human curiosity.

"It gives a very interesting example of collaboration and how curiosity could be a perfect way to stop our differences in search for knowledge," he said.

He says the text hasn't been well understood to date because it's "impossible" for a single scholar to tackle a project of this size and complexity.

"So, we've assembled this team from across the globe to tackle it together."

The project, formally titled Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: A Digital Edition of the General e Grand Estoria, is the first interdisciplinary study of the text. It includes researchers from Canada, the U.K., the U.S., Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Colombia and Tunisia.

To support the work, Peña and his colleagues are using a digital platform called Colabora, which he co-developed in 2018. The platform's AI tools are being trained to read 13th-century handwriting to speed up transcription. 

The first volume of the English translation is expected to be publicly available within the next couple of years.

The text was originally intended to span six volumes, though only five were completed, according to the project. 

The project also hopes to build outreach materials to help general audiences better understand the text and will partner with libraries and school districts in North America, Europe and North Africa to share the work widely.

"As well as making the [text] freely accessible to new audiences, this project will demonstrate the possibilities of large-scale, interdisciplinary, multicultural collaboration across the humanities," said Katie Brown, a co-director of the project and senior lecturer at the University of Exeter in England, in a statement last week. 

A portion of the funding will provide graduate students with experiential learning opportunities in Spain alongside the document.

"In the spirit of how the original text was written, we want to create a network of students from many countries and cultures and give them opportunities to work and study together at the same time," Peña said in the UBCO release.

The full project is slated to continue through 2032.