Ciudad Universitaria, Edificio D, Plaza Menéndez Pelayo, s/n, 28040 Madrid 91 394 5863 proyecto@visionarias.es

Why is our project relevant?

The Catalogue of Living Saints performs a transference of knowledge that generates social value because it disseminates research for the benefit of civil society. We are proposing here a tool to reach a lay audience with different interest rates, whether on gender, religion, or history of Castile and Iberia. The wiki format makes these texts accessible to a non-academic audience, allowing reading without critical apparatus (especially in the printed lives, since manuscripts do matter to textual criticism). On the other hand, the catalogue gets a cultural impact insofar as it contributes to the knowledge of the funds of archives and libraries in Spain and therefore allows the national and international dissemination of bibliographical and documentary products containing the cultural history of the past. The catalogue permits the access to texts that had an important diffusion and influenced lifestyles, by way of promoting imitation, of many women in the past. This helps to alleviate the lack of knowledge about Castilian holy women at the end of the Middle Ages, who not only got the model of the Golden Legend for their imitatio, but of other prestigious late medieval visionary women closer in terms of latitude and chronology. In this sense, the catalogue takes into account gender parameters. Unlike men, for women in the years 1400-1550 the religious sphere was almost the only means of reaching the public world.