The main impulse for this project derives 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 her 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, who had for many years been thinking of such an initiative and who had started establishing contacts with specialists to that end.
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 the four chronicles, published with the title of Chronique du roi D. Pedro in 1985, 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 magnitude. Most of the translators are British, but the team also includes 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, member of their advisory board and 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 shortly after this meeting. The completion of the project will be a worthy tribute to his vision and support. The translation will now be published under the guidance of Megan Milan, the present Tamesis Commissioning Editor and Managing Editor, who succeeded Scott Mahler, who guided the project for a few years after Elspeth Ferguson. Boydell & Brewer’s long experience in publishing medieval texts guarantees a quality edition, planned for Fall 2023.
In 2009, the Direcção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas, Portugal, offered a grant to initiate the 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, awarded a substantial grant to complete the Project and build the present supporting website. Without the recognition of the inherent value of this undertaking and the trust placed on the members of the team, the Fernão Lopes Translation project 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 present website. This followed a process of consultation with Dr. Hutchinson and two of her Teaching Assistants in Portuguese, Fernanda Guida and Cristiane Lira. The objective was to find and 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 to the present website, which thus migrated to the city of Fernão Lopes, Lisbon, the place where it really belongs. We believe that with the assistance of specialists in Portuguese Medieval Studies and their graduate students at the IEM and the IT Lab of Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, the Fernão Lopes website will continue to be developed as a research tool and as a companion to Fernão 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, the Project lost also Professor Clive Willis, responsible for 43% of the translation and a thorough stylistic revision. 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, and all members of the Project are more determined than ever to bring this monumental translation to a successful conclusion. It will remain as a lasting tribute to their outstanding work, especially to the memory of Professor Amado's life of study, research and ground-breaking publications devoted to Fernão Lopes and his chronicles, and to Professor Willis as an outstanding scholar and gifted translator. Without them this Project would truly not have been possible.