When it was originally published in 2015, the title of Paul Bertrand's contribution to the study of medieval documentary practices clarified the precise geographical scope of his archive: Les écritures ordinaires: Sociologie d'un temps de révolution documentaire (entre royaume de France et Empire, 1250-1350). In this fine English translation, that geography has broadened from the prosperous Francophone lands "between the kingdom of France and the Empire" to medieval Europe as a whole. The archive has remained the same.
As Michael Clanchy suggests in his generous foreword, this could perhaps be justified on the grounds that many of the phenomena examined by Bertand can be found elsewhere in Europe at around the same time, as in England; or were in the process of development, as in Scandinavia. And yet the documentary developments taking place on this particular political and linguistic frontier are not necessarily representative of more universal trends. This territory (the map on p. xxiiii is much too small and illegible to be useful; a slightly better version can be downloaded here) was the most prosperous and densely populated on the Continent, and also the most precociously literate in the northern French vernacular by the end of the twelfth century. It included the southern part of independent Flanders; the many lordships of Hainaut, Namur, Brabant, and Wallonia on the southwestern edge of the Holy Roman Empire; and the cultural powerhouse of independent Arras and its environs, absorbed into the kingdom of Philip Augustus in 1191 and constituted as the royal appanage of Artois in 1237. It was Arras that produced the earliest "French" vernacular plays, customary laws, charters, monumental inscriptions, and other literary and pragmatic texts--most well before 1250. [1] It was on this frontier that Gabrielle Spiegel located the emergence of vernacular historiography, in direct response to French imperial expansion in the same era. [2] It was here, too, that Steven Vanderputten and Robert Berkhofer have followed the ever-more elaborate monastic practices of counting, accounting, and recounting which reached an apogee of exactitude in the mid-twelfth century--again in Arras, with the urban census conducted by Guimann of Saint-Vaast. [3] Of these works, among others relevant to the book's argument, only Berkhofer's is cited.
In her assessment of Les écritures ordinaires, reviewed in TMR in 2016, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak praised its central claim that "revolutions in writing and in routine documentary practices were mutually constitutive." But she also gently observed that its chronology was rendered problematic by the author's "simplified" treatment of the earlier documentary revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whose makers had pioneered many of the practices Bertrand claims for the long thirteenth century. Although his preface to the English translation stresses that "is a real new edition," thoroughly updated and "taking into account the opinions and recommendations of published critical reviews" (xii), a comparison of the two texts does not reveal such thoroughgoing revision. The author has dutifully included Bedos-Rezak's specific recommendations in his bibliography, but there is no sign of engagement with the extremely important scholarship, available even in 2015, which has documented lay literacies and pragmatic writing in earlier periods: some of it published as part of the very series in which this book is now featured. [4]
As a result, the picture he paints of documentary practices before 1250 borders on caricature. According to Bertrand, it was only in the fourteenth century that the laity "at last" attained any widespread familiarity with writing (7); this is manifestly not the case for many medieval regions, including post-Carolingian Catalonia, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, and the entire Mediterranean littoral. Why should it be "surprising" (92) that charters and cartularies were treated as liturgical texts and kept on or within altars, when they were attesting (like relics and other treasures) to an institution's patrimony? The assertion that "[t]he notion of community was still fragile in the twelfth century and strongly tied to the religious world" (8) makes no sense at all when applied to a region of self-governing towns. Moreover, it is simply not true that power was "wielded by a patriciate" here, and that it was only after 1280 that "this power was contested" by guilds and citizens (13). In fact, the patriciate only managed to seize that power from elected communal governments at that very end of the thirteenth century--which is why there were massive organized uprisings against the abuse of longstanding urban liberties for centuries thereafter. [5] The dark underbelly of Bertrand's triumphal argument about the democratization of writing is that people were being enmeshed in an ever wider and stronger web of surveillance at the local level, as well as at the level of competing states. [6]
The geographic and temporal scope of the book is certainly warranted by the richness of this region's documentary cultures and the sheer quantity and variety of everyday writings that were produced and preserved there. But the deeper history of those cultures' development, which undergirded and enabled this "writing revolution" is never fairly assessed, and often misrepresented. To take one example, the first sentence of the introduction credits one of Bertrand's heroes, the cleric Thierry d'Hireçon, with the archival innovations that made the administration of comital Artois the envy and model of other princely courts (as Malcolm Vale, also not cited, has shown). [7] Bertrand places Thierry in the household of Mahaut "countess of Artois" (p. 5; Les écritures ordinaires, p. 11) beginning in 1294. But Mahaut was then countess of Burgundy and did not inherit her father's appanage until Robert II's ignominious death at the Battle of Courtrai (Kortrijk) in 1302. Although Bertrand knows this (he mentions it on p. 12), he does not correct this fundamental error. Nor does he disclose that Thierry inherited, when Mahout inherited Artois, a bureaucracy that had been put in place by her father, or that its machinery had recently been reconfigured by the professionals whom Robert had brought back to Arras from Naples after 1288, thereby adding a new and foreign strand of documentary expertise to his comital chancery. And there were even older documentary practices which Robert and his agents were imitating and building upon, from the sophisticated royal record-keeping of his great-uncle, Louis IX, to the communal archive of Arras, which employed its own clerk by the end of the twelfth century. We even know his name: the playwright and prolific poet Jehan Bodel (fl. 1180-1210), who probably also presided over the documentation of his confraternity, which began keeping its own funerary register and coutumier by 1194. [8]
To acknowledge these documentary roots is not "to pursue elusive 'origins'," but to challenge the claim that the textual practices which came to dominate the region in the later thirteenth century came about "all of a sudden" (11). There is clearly a demonstrable rise in the number of surviving documents, the number of people making them, and the number of things that were being documented after 1250. And I appreciate, very much, Bertrand's insistence on recognizing the agency of the texts themselves, and the ingenuity of their makers and "graphical communities" (347). What I missed, once past the stumbling-block of the introduction, was a sustained consideration of the ways that documents and archives do not simply record reality or bear witness to legitimacy, but often work to create a semblance of reality and illusion of legitimacy in order to control access, exert power, and secure privileges in the present--and/or to project narratives of access, power, and privilege into the future. Forgery is mentioned only twice in passing, and campaigns of forgery and false compilation (like those that drove the "institutional consolidation" of the "reformed" Gregorian papacy, p. 25) are taken at face value, as are the "foundational charters" (27) which institutions often had to manufacture after the fact. Writing did not merely bear witness to "the return of heresy" in the thirteenth century (143); it fabricated heresy to serve a political agenda, as R.I. Moore has shown. [9] We need to question, constantly, the motivations that lie behind medieval documentary practices and to ask whom they benefitted and whom they were intended to exclude, discipline, or dupe. Bertrand begins to take up this problem in the book's final chapter ("The Writers") and conclusion ("Functions and Questions"), but that is too late. To be sure, placing this discussion earlier would have called into question the evidentiary status of the writings he examines throughout, complicating the meanings they are supposed to have conveyed.
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Notes:
1. Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
2. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (The New Historicism 23; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
3. E.g. Steven Vanderputten, Monastic Reform as Process: Realities and Representations in Medieval Flanders, 900-1100 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning : Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
4. Beyond the Utrecht Studies, Bertrand does not mention the existence of such revelatory works as Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950-1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne: IXe-XIIe siècle (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003); and Warren Brown et al., eds., Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
5. See e.g. the many studies by Jan Dumolyn: "Les 'plaintes' des villes flamandes à la fin du treizième siècle et les discours et pratiques politiques de la commune," Moyen Âge, 121 (2012): 383–407; "Guild Politics and Political Guilds in Fourteenth-Century Flanders," in The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe: Communication and Popular Politics, eds. Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); " Urban Revolts and Communal Politics in the Middle Ages," in Words and Deeds: Shaping Urban Politics from below in Late Medieval Europe, eds. Ben Eersels and Jelle Haemers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 213–224. I have synthesized the evidence for the erosion of urban liberties in this region: Carol Symes, "The 'School of Arras' and the Career of Adam," in Musical Culture in the World of Adam de Halle, ed. Jennifer Saltzstein (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 22-50.
6. The conditions that produce aggressive regimes of bureaucratic control are exactly those to be found on the fertile plains and wealthy towns of this region, according to the work of James C. Scott: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), especially 220-237, "Orality, Writing, and Texts."
7. Malcom G. A. Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270-1380 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
8. The Carité de Notre Dame des Ardents d'Arras, also known as the Conférie des jongleurs et des bourgeois, was chartered by the bishops of Arras and was in existence by at least the mid-twelfth century. These texts survive in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 8541. Bertrand gestures toward this important institution on p. 406, but the sources he cites are not reliable.
9. R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London: Profile, 2012).