UNIVERSITY AFFAIRS
The King and AI - A team of international scholars tackles a historical work of epic proportions

In the 13th century, an ambitious monarch named King Alfonso X of Castile commissioned a universal history of epic proportions from the origins of the world, as narrated in the Bible, to the time of his kingship. What would come to be known as the General e Grand estoria would weave together Christian, Jewish, Islamic and apocryphal biblical interpretations with stories from the mythological and historiographical traditions of the classical Greek and Latin world. It would eventually total 6,000 pages and become the largest universal history written in medieval Europe - and one of the least known. 

More than 700 years later, Francisco Peña, an associate professor in the faculty of creative and critical studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, came across the General estoria when researching biblical characters for a book. "I realized how original it was and how different. It was very interesting because it was knowledgeable of many different sources that I was not aware had circulated in medieval Spain," he says. "I could connect it to some sources that are familiar and also some ways of writing that were familiar for me." He says he thought that it warranted deeper study, "but it's huge." 

The seed was planted, and Dr. Peña organized a small team of half a dozen scholars to begin tackling the voluminous project. In 2016, they received an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to determine the feasibility of the project. Since then, the team has continued to grow and receive further funding. It now comprises almost 60 scholars and practitioners from 18 partner organizations and 33 institutions in at least 10 countries including Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Dr. Peña is the principal investigator and a co-director, along with Katie Brown from the University of Exeter in England and Francisco Gago-Jover from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. In 2025, the Confluence of Religious Cultures in Medieval Historiography: A Digital Humanities Project received $2.1 million through a SSHRC Partnership Grant. 

Read the complete article