Documentary architecture of the Scalas chapel in Seville cathedral: books for its management and administration

Abstract

The Scalas Chapel was founded by Bishop Baltasar del Río in the middle of the 16th century. The documentation concerning its management and government remains practically unex-plored, partly because of its scarcity, but above all because it does not provide much information, since the same data is found repeated in different types of diplomatic codices and some single do-cuments. From the point of view of the history of the document, however, its conservation allows us to reconstruct a truly interesting documentary landscape, which shows us how the use of writing was the tool that chaplains and confreres had to defend their rights and how it became part of their daily lives. The expression of these same rights in various formats has allowed us to draw a rich docu-mentary architecture, from which to increase the strictly historical knowledge that we had so far about what was once the chapel of the Bishop of Scalas.