A library for eternity: Books donated on death bed by Mem Peres de Oliveira, a Portuguese cleric and scholar (fifteenth century)

Abstract

In Portugal, a ‘studium generale’ was founded in the late thirteenth century by royal initiative, ecclesiastical plea, and apostolic sanction. This foundation belonged to the onset of the development of European universities, shortly after the initial wave led by the universities of Paris and Bologna. Concerning this small, albeit long-lasting, university located in a peripheral region of Europe, no official records have survived previously to the fifteenth century, when the academic documents known as Livro Verde (literally the Green Book), named after the colour of the front cover of the codex, were compiled. In order to rectify this lack of documentation regarding the Portuguese Medieval university, starting in the 1960s, a massive effort of archive surveying and documental editing and anthologising was undertaken, following what had been done in France in the late nineteenth century, or in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. The initiative, led by the highly respected Portuguese historian Artur Moreira de Sá, produced a collection of 16 large volumes - the Chartularium Universitatis Portugalensis, which consists of a compilation of nearly seven thousand documents pertaining to the Portuguese Medieval University, published between 1966 and 2004. It gathers documents from the moment of its founding (c. 1290), until its definitive relocation to Coimbra (1537), encompassing a large diversity of sources, such as papal bulls, royal letters, contracts, statutes of the university, parliament records, and many others. This paper intends to give the proper attention to a specific document, compiled in the CUP, as a particular source to inquire on the cultural milieu of the early fifteenth century Portuguese university. Among the gathered materials, we find a last will transcription of a Portuguese man of the cloth, Mem Peres de Oliveira, the dean of the diocese of Évora (in southern Portugal) and Bachelor of Canon law, dated May 7, 1407. Besides the several sums of money endowed by the deceased to support the studies of the more destitute students at the Portuguese university, this specific bequest, interestingly, also concerns the donation of a significant amount of manuscripts to be used by them when studying the disciplines of canon law, civil law, and theology. Although published in CUP, this document has never been comprehensively treated from a cultural point of view, namely the library itself. Considering the school use of the donated books, the census of its authors and contents acquires a great deal of importance as it allows identifying the most relevant textbooks for the Portuguese university and, at the same time, to reconstitute the private library of a Portuguese ecclesiastical from the early fifteenth century.