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The documentary fund of this
extensive epistolary constitutes one of the most important sources
for an understanding of the history of Mallorca in the seventeenth century. It
contains abundant information about a period with large lacunae.
Forming a general epistolary, the letters, taken together, offer
valuable data and unpublished aspects of the economic and
political history, the relations between Mallorca and the central
state, costumes of everyday life, or the state of Catalan and
Spanish language in the island. The complex and influential
personality of Pedro de Santacilia y Pax, Viceroy of Mallorca,
a general of enormous power, and participant of various European wars
– whose bibliography is, surprisingly, in large part undefined –
is in itself a focus of interest of enormous importance. But the
epistolary also contains several letters of the Santacilia family
well into the eighteenth century, and, due to their importance, they are
published here without exception.
The volume of this work is enormous, and at this moment we are only
at the first phase of it. We have digitalized all the letters (all
in all more than 14,000 images), with the aim of preserving the originals,
and also working more comfortably with them, and finally offering
the facsimiles of all the letters. On the basis of this material we
are transcribing and encoding all the letters, in order to create a
linguistic, historical and cultural database, which will enable us
to analyze the material in all its depth.
At the same time we are working on the inventory and identification
of all the senders and persons referred to in each letter, and on the
catalogue and description of the places and historical events
mentioned. In the possession of this information we would analyze
the content of the letters, and accomplish their classification and
annotation.
On the basis of these data, we intend to publish an epistolary that will
lead to a re-reading of the history of Mallorca, and especially of
the events in which Pedro de Santacilia participated at the middle
and end of the seventeenth century. We are sure of recovering
important information on the life, costumes, language and politics
of this part of Europe. |
