• Reviewed by:
• Constance Berman
• cberman@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu

The cartulary of Bigorre as published by Ravier and Cursente contains 83 acts concerning that mid-Pyreneean county located east of the Bearn and west of the Comminges based on three surviving manuscripts: two copies in Pau that appear to come from a fourteenth-century exemplar now lost and a mid-thirteenth-century manuscript in Bordeaux. There is a searchable CD-ROM for textual variants which provides translations into modern French. The importance of the publication is its presentation of a large number of Gascon or mixed Gascon and Latin texts, with extensive glossaries of Gascon terms and place-names. This is a family or comital cartulary with few dated acts. Its lists of rents or obligations owed the counts, homesteads owned by them, grants of properties to dependents, records of conflict resolution, agreements between equals or oaths of faith from dependents are datable to as early as the mid-eleventh century and as late as the last quarter of the thirteenth. Unlike other such family cartularies (such as that of the counts of Champagne or the Williams of Montpellier), this contains no wills, no marriage agreements, and very few contracts with churches or monasteries. Early lists of cens appear to include labor services, later ones are paid in money. The extensive introduction (i-xciii) to this edition includes a history of the county and of the relationship of the manuscripts as well as a discussion of whether this is a true cartulary or in fact what many archivists have deemed a book of rents; it provides a wealth of detail about bishops and local authorities that is often difficult to unearth elsewhere. Pages xcv-xcvi provide an updated list of the counts from mid-ninth through late-thirteenth century. There are also bibliography, maps, and various tables useful to local study. A few of the charters have been analyzed by Benoît Cursente, Des Maisons et des hommes. La Gascogne médiévale (Toulouse, 1998), or in his article "La féodalité dans un comté sans fiefs. La Bigorre du milieu du XIe au milieu du XIIIe siècle," in Fiefs et feodalite dans l'Europe meridionale (Italie, France du Midi, Peninsule iberique) du Xe au XII siècle, ed. Pierre Bonnassie (Toulouse, 1998). There is one customary or "fors" for the region, which has been discussed in Paul Ourliac and Monique Gilles, Fors anciens de Bearn (Paris, 1990). An exceptionally well-produced edition.