Two years with the Properties Registry: Judicial sources of the built environment of Lisbon in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Abstract

This article highlights the documentary importance of court records, not so much through the individual and specific information contained in each case, but rather through a serial reading and analysis that is essential to understanding the institutions that produced them. To this end, the study focuses on court records related to construction disputes from the Registry of the Properties Court, a court specific to the city of Lisbon in the early modern period. It also explains why these court records are currently kept in the National Archive Torre do Tombo, in the collection of the Fundo Geral dos Feitos Findos, and how they can be accessed.