The Royal Deeds of Navarre in the 15th and 16th Centuries – ACRONAVARRE

The objective of this Franco-Spanish project is to write the history of administrative practices in the region of the Pyrenees in the light of the royal deeds signed by the kings and queens of Navarre between 1484 (accession of the Albret family to the throne of Navarre) and 1594 (accession of Henri de Navarre to the throne of France under the name of Henri IV). French royal deeds produced in the Renaissance under the reigns of kings François I, Henri II and François II have already been catalogued and published, and they are often used in research on the first half of the 16th century. However, no thorough catalogue nor publication of royal deeds exists concerning the sovereigns of Navarre of the Foix-Albret-Bourbon families, whose history, stretching from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Early Modern period, is inseparable from that of their French cousins. The integration of archival data and a fuller understanding of the multiple aspects of stately administration and relations in research on French political history of the 16th century is rendered all the more difficult for the lack of such research tools concerning Navarre. No methodological repertory of these deeds – that is, royal patents (ordonnances, lettres de finance, de justice, de grâce et d’office) – produced by the kings and queens of Navarre has been undertaken as of yet, even though these documents are the reflection and the expression of a political will that had to articulate itself not only relative to French and Spanish pressures and influence, but also relative to the assemblies of states of countries whose masters in the Pyrenees were the sovereigns of Navarre. Previous research has indicated the existence of approximately 7,000 royal deeds produced between 1484 and 1594. These fragile manuscripts are largely unpublished and conserved not only in France but also in Spain. The identification of the documents will be possible through the use of inventories, accounting registers and an attentive analysis of archival documents, either originals or copies, produced by the royal authority or its agent, in privy or state Council or of its own volition, with the countersignature of an authorized officer (a secretary, superintendant of finances, treasurer, etc.). In parallel to this thorough research, a catalogue and a publication of historical documents will be created from the database of all royal deeds that may be found in the archives. Along with this database, other tools will be developed for the digital preservation of the documents and their accessibility online (using Omeka). In order to guarantee the interoperability and the permanence of storage of the data, this digital project will be based on open source environments and software. The catalogue will be available via open access on a dedicated website, accessible during its development, which will allow interested researchers to use the corpus in preparation for international conferences organized around the themes of constructing catalogues of medieval and early modern documents, the importance of royal deeds in institutional history, deeds as source documents of social and religious history in the 16th century (with an emphasis on the international dimension of the Court), as well as the utility of catalogues to the historian.
Through the creation of the first catalogue and the first critical edition of royal deeds of Navarre produced from 1484 to 1594, this project crosses historical periods (covering both the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern period) and crosses frontiers (as a result of the geographic distribution of the source documents, but also as a result of the participation of researchers from French and Spanish research centres). The project will contribute to a better understanding of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the French Wars of Religion, as well as to that of Franco-Spanish relations during a long 16th century.