The Association of Friends of the National Historical Archive announces the second edition of the research competition. In 2002, the same Association organised the first edition of the “Torre de Tábara” Research Prize. Fifteen years later, the town that gave birth to the most active and important medieval scriptorium in Europe will be the setting for the presentation of the second edition of this prize, which is based on research into the documentary collection of the National Historical Archive (AHN).
The logo of the Association of Friends of the National Historical Archive itself is an anagram of the tower of Tábara “created by a researcher”, explains the president. These facts confirm the magnificent documentary value of the manuscript preserved in the AHN “as a consequence of the disentailment processes of the 19th century”.
The AHN is the only state archive (and therefore dependent on the Ministry of Education and Culture) that has an Association of Friends, created in 1988 with the aim of “promoting and carrying out actions aimed at achieving better protection, knowledge and dissemination of the collections conserved in the AHN, collaborating with this archive to strengthen its social and cultural functions”.
The “recovery” of the “Torre de Tábara” research prize is also a contribution of the Association to the closing events of the 150th anniversary of the AHN, which this weekend in Tábara will be the culmination of an extensive programme of activities.
This international cultural event will also serve to “discover” the permanent prominence given by the AHN to the Scriptorium of the monastery of San Salvador de Tábara (the current church of Santa María) and to the most important codex produced there between 968 and 970.
In the 2014 edition of the International Archives Day, in addition to an open day and a small exhibition of works from the centre, Mª Jesús Álvarez-Coca González gave a lecture on the Beatus of Tábara. In 2008 the parchment inaugurated the cycle “The Piece of the Month”, an initiative promoted to disseminate the AHN’s documentary collections through the periodic exhibition of some of its most representative documents, “either because of their historical content, the characteristics of their support or because they have recently undergone a restoration process”.
As a preamble to this cycle, a facsimile of the Beatus of Tábara and several documents relating to El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, were on display. The brochure of the codex was written by Natalia Fernández Casado, from Zamora, currently deputy director of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid, who described the Beatus of Tábara as “one of the emblematic works of Spanish medieval culture, as well as an essential source for the study of the Middle Ages and the art of Mozarabic miniatures”. The manuscript was again selected as “Piece of the Month” in April 2016, already inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.