This book includes papers given at two meetings in 1999, at Utrecht and Leeds, on the legal role of written records in several areas of Early and Mid Medieval Europe. Most of the areas concerned are either just outside the original Limes or just inside it; there is no study of the copious documentation of the Iberian Peninsula, the Papacy, or of Scandinavia. The legal practices of various Germanic areas thus dominate the volume. All the papers are presented in English, although many are not by native English speakers, and this lends an air of dogged determination to the whole volume, with hardly a glimpse of any lighter touch. Some of the English is correspondingly odd (Anna Adamska, for example, uses the word "memorize" to mean the opposite of what it usually means), but on the whole this is a sign of the times which there is not much point in deploring, and in the wider international community it may well be generally welcomed. Despite the high academic level, there are some general handicaps to the collection, though; there are no maps at all, which makes some of the arguments less easy to follow; there is no general bibliography, nor even a bibliographical list at the end of each chapter, which makes references hard to find (the sooner we all adopt the simple Harvard system, the easier reading will be); there is no index; there is no biographical nor even institutional information about the contributors, which would help us see where they are coming from. These are minor quibbles, of course, compared with the valuable and solid scholarship manifested throughout, and the excellent production by the editors of the Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy. There is a certain tension, though, between the title of the volume and the title of the series; literacy is at root a linguistic question, and there is only a little knowledge manifested here of the copious literature now available on the relationship between speech and writing, both in a modern and a historical context.
The volume is structured into four separate parts. Part I, "Writing Charters", contains four studies. The first (15-25) is Mark Mersiowsky, "Towards a Reappraisal of Carolingian Sovereign Charters"; Mersiowsky is understandably irritated by the now outdated habit of concentrating on the discovery of forgeries, which implied that inauthentic documents were not important data in their own right; he also makes the important point that beneficiaries of charters were closely involved in their production. The second is David Postles, "Country Clerici and the Composition of English Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Private Charters" (27-42), who notices that even the non-literate had some familiarity with documentation; this is the Walter Ong line. Country clerics were responsible for local charters relating to rural land of the peasantry, and we can see local drafting traditions involved. The third is Philippe Depreux, "The Development of Charters Confirming Exchange by the Royal Administration (Eighth-Tenth Centuries)" (43-62), who looks at exchange documents, in which one of the parties is often a King. These documents had two originals, one for each party, and the documents were an integral part of the legal transaction. The fourth paper is Herwig Weigl, "What to Write in Court: Literacy and Lawsuits in Late Medieval Austria" (63-80), who considers the impact of litigation in civil cases on literacy in the Austrian context. The original documentation was in Latin; the use of German increased after 1270, and became a majority in the 1290s (a pattern repeated elsewhere).
Part II, entitled "'From Memory to Written Record' Revisited", is based on the ground-breaking work of Michael Clanchy, and although he was not a participant, his godfatherly role is keenly felt here. The first paper in this part is Anna Adamska, ""From Memory to Written Record" in the Periphery of Medieval Latinitas: The Case of Poland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries" (83-100). She shows how the introduction of literacy (in Latin) and Christianity were inter-related. Probably there are only ten genuine documents that survive from Poland before 1200, but there are many from the thirteenth century; they all concern pious donations given to ecclesiastical institutions, and were written by the beneficiaries. This was thus at first a Church initiative, particularly associated with the Cistercians, until the secular contexts took over.
The second paper in Part II is Eef Dukhof, "Goatskin and Growing Literacy: the Penetration of Writing in the Former Counties of Holland and Zeeland in the Thirteenth Century in Relation to the Changes of the Internal and External Features of the Charters Issued" (101-112). The Dutch scholars have a great advantage in that it is known, for all charters from the area before 1300, who wrote them, when and where. Literacy grows markedly in the thirteenth century here too; script becomes concomitantly more cursive, and the vernacular rises as Latin declines, at different dates and rates in different scriptoria. The point about goatskin, which became the norm in the 1240s, is that, like sheepskin in England, it was thinner than the previously used calfskin, and symbolizes the increasingly simple, functional, inexpensive and generally usable nature of the documentation in Dutch which was needed, and had to be trusted, as proof.
The third paper is Dauvit Brown, "The Writing of Charters in Scotland and Ireland in the Twelfth Century" (113-131). There are 750 such charters to consider from Scotland, and ten from Ireland, all in Latin and produced in a Church context (at least, according to Brown's definition of what a charter is). At the start of the century scribes tended to be working in the Church, but later in the century royal scribes came to predominate. The final paper in this section is Ivan Hlavacek, "The Use of Charters and Other Documents in Premyslide Bohemia" (133-144); the oldest charter here dates from 993, the last one considered is from 1306, and the genre was encouraged here as elsewhere by developments in the church, particularly in this case new monastic orders.
Part III is entitled "Preserving Charters". The first paper is Georges Declercq, "Originals and Cartularies: the Organization of Archival Memory (Ninth-Eleventh Centuries)" (147-170). Cartularies, into which important documents were copied, became vital parts of the collective memory of their institution. There are 448 original documents from the Carolingian Empire and its successor states from before 900, 350 of them royal (imperial), with many others only now surviving in their later cartulary; whereas Lucca has preserved 1800 from the period 685-1000, being less interested in the cartulary mode. Similarly St Gall had no cartulary, which is why the originals were kept and now survive; whereas Hrabanus Maurus' Fulda cartulary has some 2000 charters in it. The archives had a pivotal role to play in monastic reforms: "the assertive effort of the reformed monks to construct a usable past that suited new needs and pretensions" (167) is a kinder way of phrasing the fashion for fabricating (semi-)forgeries than we have become accustomed to. This is the most satisfying paper in the volume.
The following paper is Laurent Morelle, "The Metamorphosis of Three Monastic Charter Collections in the Eleventh Century (Saint-Amand, Saint-Riquier, Montier-en-Der)" (171-204). These three monasteries, all Merovingian foundations, had differing archival and historiographical approaches to their records, and Morelle shows how far they revealed or distorted the original material. Then Alexander Hecht, "Between Memoria, Historiography and Pragmatic Literacy: the Liber Delegacionum of Reichersberg" (205-211), considers this Cartulary from Bavaria (1080-1084).
There are two papers in the final Part IV, "Using Charters". Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, "From 'Improvised Theatre' to Scripted Roles: Literacy and Changes in Communication in North Italian Law Courts" (215-237) is fascinating. Increasingly from the late twelfth century, litigation in North Italian Law Courts was based on written texts, on the reading out of prepared scripts rather than on unscripted argument. The data adduced mostly come from Milan between 1140 and 1276; the twelfth-century records give us indirect speech. Texts produced as evidence were also read silently by judges. Yet, despite a reference to the work of Koch and Osterreicher at the end, the crucial distinction between documents in Latin -- probably not intelligible to all -- and in Italo-Romance is not drawn out nor examined. The final paper is Simon Teuscher, "Textualizing Peasant Enquiries: German Weistumer between Orality and Literacy" (239-253), considering legal texts from villages from 1346, in Latin. New versions in German appeared in the following century, but only Latin ones are quoted here.
Karl Heidecker's "Introduction" (1-12) helpfully draws the threads together, and readers in a hurry could just concentrate on this. But every researcher who works on Charters and Cartularies will benefit from considering the many ideas and themes that are elaborated here, even though the geographical differences become as generally clear as the similarities.