The main impulse for this project derived form a meeting at the 2005 International Medieval Congress, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, with a group of fellow Iberian medievalists, participating in a panel led by Professor María Bullón-Fernández, University of Seattle, all stressing the need for an English translation of Fernão Lopes’s chronicles. Encouraged by the interest expressed by many colleagues in the United States, Dr. Amélia Hutchinson, then Lecturer at the University of Georgia, GA, contacted Professor Teresa Amado, world-renowned Lopesian specialist at the University of Lisbon. Professor Amado herself had also been thinking of such an initiative and had already invited Professor Iona McCleery to participate.
The main hurdles were the magnitude of the corpus, over sixteen hundred pages, and the complexity of the work, which required a team of translators equipped for the challenge. The French translation of the Crónica de D. Pedro, the shortest of Lopes's chronicles, published in 1985 with the title of Chronique du roi D. Pedro, had taken Jacqueline Steunou over ten years to complete. To guarantee the conclusion of an English translation of the three chronicles in a much shorter time, Hutchinson and Amado invited a group of fellow scholars and translators of medieval Portuguese, some of them Lopesian specialists in their own right, and secured a publisher willing to accept an undertaking of this length and complexity. Most of the translators were British, but the team brought together included also fellow American scholars (see 'The Team').
Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY, a well-known publisher in Medieval Studies and the Humanities, readily welcomed the project, encouraged by the late Professor Alan Deyermond, a member of their advisory board and an internationally acclaimed medievalist, who immediately recognized its significance and prestige. On July 7, 2009, Amélia Hutchinson had an inaugural planning meeting with Ms. Elspeth Ferguson, then Tamesis Commissioning Editor, and Professor Alan Deyermond. Sadly, Professor Deyermond passed away a few months later. The completion of the project is a well-deserved tribute to his vision and support. The translation was ultimately published under the guidance of Megan Milan, Tamesis Commissioning Editor and Managing Editor, succeeding Scott Mahler, who guided the project for a few years after Elspeth Ferguson retired. Boydell & Brewer’s long experience in publishing medieval texts guaranteed a quality edition, and the full translation of Lope's chronicles eventually came out in 2023.
In 2009, shortly after the above meeting with Boydell & Brewer's representatives, the Direcção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas, Portugal, offered a grant to initiate the translation project. Dr. Patrícia Anne Odber de Baubeta, Senior Lecturer in Portuguese in the Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, a medievalist and translator of early Portuguese texts, offered the University of Birmingham for logistic support and as a venue for the Project's annual meetings. In June 2010 the National Endowment for the Humanities, USA, also awarded a substantial grant to complete the Project and to build the present supporting website. Without their recognition of the inherent value of this undertaking and the trust placed on the members of the team, the Fernão Lopes Translation Project, and eventually the Fernão Lopes Portal, would not have been possible.
In 2012, Dr. Sean Hendricks, then Web Developer Principal, and his team of IT specialists at the Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia, GA, USA, initiated the task of designing the website. This followed a process of consultation with Dr. Hutchinson and two of her Teaching Assistants in Portuguese, Fernanda Guida and Cristiane Lira, now Professors at Spellman College, Atlanta, and at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, respectively. The objective was to agree on a platform to support a website that could be easily populated by history, literature and philology specialists with very limited IT experience. The website was hosted by the University of Georgia for several years, latterly under the guidance of Dr. Stephanie Lynn, but after December 2019 the OIT could no longer host Drupal based websites and a new home had to be found.
In January 2020, Professor Maria João Branco, then Director of the Instituto de Estudos Medievais (IEM), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, with the assistance of Dr. Pedro Marques and Dr. Tiago Viúla de Faria, offered a new home for the website, now the Fernão Lopes Portal, which migrated also geographically to Lisbon, the chronicler's city and the place where it really belongs. We believed that with the collaboration of IEM's specialists and their graduate students, as well as the IT Lab of Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH), the Fernão Lopes Portal could continue to be developed as a research tool and as a companion to Lopes's chronicles.
Sadly, over the years the Project lost several of its collaborators. In August 5, 2013, Professor Teresa Amado passed away most unexpectedly, though with nearly 90% of the translation completed. In April of the following year, Professor Clive Willis, responsible for 43% of the translation and a thorough stylistic revision, also passed away. In the following years, two other colleagues, Shirley Clarke and Francisco Fernandes, had to stop their contribution owing to serious health issues. The legacy of these esteemed and much-admired colleagues, however, will be neither wasted nor forgotten.
The Chronicles of Fernão Lopes (Boydell& Brewer/Tamesis), the first full translation of Lopes's chronicles, finally came out in 2023. It was a day to rejoice! For all collaborators, this was also a lasting tribute to our late colleagues' outstanding work, especially Professor Amado's life of study, research and ground-breaking publications devoted to Fernão Lopes and his chronicles, and Professor Willis, as an outstanding scholar and gifted translator. Without them both Projects, translation and website, would truly not have been possible.
