Jesús Alturo i Perucho

In October 2021 Alturo, with Tània Alaix, identified the author of the Complaints of Guitard Isarn, Lord of Caboet, in the person of the subdeacon Ramon de Cabó, who has become, for now, the first author of Catalan literature. Interested also by the first written witnesses of Catalan language, he has dated the Homilies d'Organyà, and of the Catalan translation of the Visigothic Code, both preserved in a fragment of a codex from Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey and of the one served in the Archives of the Bishopric of Urgell.

In 1982 Alturo was awarded with the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona for his research L'arxiu antic de Santa Anna de Barcelona del 942 al 1200. (Aproximació històrico-lingüística). In 2004 his work was awarded with the Premi Crítica Serra d'Or for the book Història del llibre manuscrit a Catalunya. This book is considered the standard introduction to the subject in Catalonia. On 13 December 2021, he received the Creu de Sant Jordi for “his major contributions to the history of medieval literature and art of the Romanesque period in Catalonia”.

Alturo is author of an extensive bibliographic and academic production with more than three hundred papers, books or chapters of books, which includes the publication and analysis of various medieval charters collections, and of fragments of manuscripts, identifying and studying pieces as relevant as the earliest known evidence of the Liber de dono perseuerantiae by Augustine of Hippo, of the Pamphilus de amore, of the Jaufré, of the pilgrim Egeria, among others. He is also the author of critical editions of medieval literary texts, such as sermons attributed to the bishop and abbot Oliba or the grammarian Borrell Guibert, and of early medieval epigraphic texts and studies of early medieval Latin glossaries, among which those that denote the diffusion of the Liber glossarum in Catalonia. In 2019 he produced a new critical edition of the Planctus monialis transmitted by the ms. Vat. lat. 3251. He also identified and published a critical edition of an unknown testimony of another planctus monialis from Santa María de Obarra.

He became a member of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine in 1994. He is a member of the Société nationale des antiquaires de la France (2013), a corresponding member of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona (2007), an honorary member of the Societat Catalana de Numismàtica and a member of the Societat Catalana d'Estudis Litúrgics (Institut d'Estudis Catalans). He has been Directeur d'Études invité at l'École Pratique des Hautes Études de París. Under the project Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi, he is director of the Series Hispanica. In 2017 he published Chartae Latinae Antiquiores Cataloniae, which bring together a total of 100 original charters from the 9th century, preserved in Catalan archives.

Alturo is professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, initially in Latin Philology (since 1976) and later in palaeography, codicology and diplomatics (since 1992), as chair and replacing his teacher,Anscari M. Mundó.

Jesús Alturo i Perucho (born 10 March 1954 in El Pont de Suert) is a Catalan palaeographer, philologist and cultural historian.