The most characteristic form for scholarship on cartularies in the three decades since the seminal École des chartes workshop of 1991 is surely the conference volume. New York/Princeton 1999, Béziers 2002, Huelva 2009, Madrid 2010, Nancy 2010, and Pau/Pamplona 2010-11 [1] are now joined by the publication under review, which collects selected papers from a 2015 gathering at the University of Lisbon entitled “Cartularies in Medieval Europe: Texts and Contexts.” Despite the fact that the cartulary form seems to have been adopted first in East Francia, and was popular throughout the medieval Latin West, Europe in this case, like the series of conferences, is weighted heavily toward the Western Mediterranean. Of the fifteen papers, ten address sources from Iberia, four sources from Italy, and one sources from England; seven are in Spanish, four in Italian, three in English, and one in Portuguese. They are for the most part not for the faint of heart. The mantra of the new cartulary scholarship is that they are objects of historical study in their own right, rather than mere vessels for the transmission of the data-filled documents that they contain. Adherence to this principle in this volume means that a delightful story about a woman who helped a bunch of Sardinian servi forge a document using her access to the seal of the giudice of Arborea (148) is therefore a rarity. Most of the individual papers concentrate on detailed diplomatic, codicological, and paleographical analyses of a source or small set of sources from the second half of the medieval millennium: the Becerros góticos of Valpuesta (s. 11-12) by J. M. Ruiz Asencio; Cardeña (1085x86), in separate articles by J. A. Fernández Flórez and S. Serna Serna; and Sahagún (1110) by M. Herrero de la Fuente; the three earliest Worcester cartularies (s. 11) by F. Tinti; the Becerro gótico (again) and Becerro segundo (s. 13-14) of Sahagún by L. Agúndez San Miguel; the Becerro gótico (c. 1120)and Becerro galicano (c. 1195) of San Millán de la Cogolla by D. Peterson; the Sardinian condaghi of S. Pietro di Silki (s. 11), S. Nicola di Trullas (s. 12), S. Maria di Bonarcado (s. 12), and S. Michele di Salvennor (s. 12-13) by B. Fadda and M. Rapetti; three registri of S. Maria di Chiaravalle in Milan (s. 13-14) by M. Calleri; the Chartaria I-III of S. Ambrogio in Milan(s. 13-14) by M. L. Mangini; a livellario of S. Maria delle Vigne in Genoa (s. 13-14) by S. Macchiavello; three inventories and a cartulary of the diocese of Évora (s. 14) by H. Vasconcelos Vilar; the Libro blanco and Libro de dotaciones of the cathedral of Seville (1411) by D. Belmonte Fernández; the Livro verde of the University of Coimbra (1471) by A. de Oliveira Leitão; and two collections of Portuguese diplomatic (i.e., international relations) materials (s. 15) by N. Vigil Montes. All of the papers are heavily descriptive, chock full of collations and page sizes and spelling variations and documentary typologies and scribal tics and arguments about dating; most also devote some thought to the logic of compilation, placing various texts somewhere on the now familiar spectrum between administrative and memorial functions.
The brief editors’ preface (in English) is mostly devoted to top-line summaries of the papers, with no real effort at drawing connections. The papers by Tinti on Worcester, Agúndez on Sahagún, and Peterson on San Millán form a coherent and intentional triptych: each explores why an institution produced more than one cartulary in a given period, focusing on questions of memory, reaction, and order. The pairs of papers on Cardeña and Sahagún complement each other, as well, although in a less coordinated fashion. Other themes appear only after a reading of the whole collection. To mention just a few: First, there is the utility of teasing out the elements of factitious cartularies,physically made up of groupings of documents originally assembled for separate purposes, as at Valpuesta or S. Ambrogio. This is a development beyond recent efforts (also on display here) at documentary archaeology which uncover textual layers--pre-cartularies, embedded archives, dossiers--in such volumes. Second, there is the utility of studying cartularies in relation to other contemporary cartularies and administrative codices, seeing them as part of a coherent management strategy of an institution. Again, this can be thought of as a development beyond recent efforts (again also on display here) to explore changes in strategies over time at an institution, from one cartulary to the next. In that vein, a striking parallel presents itself between the paired codices of Seville, which organize the same information geographically (Libro blanco) and chronologically (Libro de dotaciones), and the remarkable digital edition of the Becerro galicano of San Millán [2], which the user can reorder according to the actual organization or chronology. Third, there is the utility of going beyond the “golden age” of cartularies into Later Middle Ages, where the heterogeneity of administrative/memorial codices prompts questions about the coherence of the genre in the earlier period, which of course is what grounded the research questions that have inspired three decades’ worth of studies.
The level of scholarship on display here is uniformly of the highest order. And the volume surely meets the hope of the editors that “despite the diversity of the cases examined and approaches employed, this volume will be of use not only to those who are currently engaged in the study of cartularies but also to researchers who are involved in the broader investigation of how and to what ends medieval institutions established and managed their archival memories” (xv). But it seems like cartulary scholarship is ready for a next step, one that draws on these and many other detailed studies to explore whether the trees add up to a forest or, as is more likely, forests (Chartularlandschaften, anyone?). [3]
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Notes:
1. Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse, eds., Les cartulaires (Paris, 1993); Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth, eds., Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West (Toronto, 2002); Daniel Le Blevec, ed., Les cartulaires méridionaux (Paris, 2006); Elena E. Rodríguez Díaz and Antonio Claret García Martínez, eds., La escritura de la memoria: Los cartularios (Huelva, 2011); Julio Escalona and Hélène Sirantoine, eds., Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir: Espagne et Occident chrétien (VIIIe-XIIe siècles) (Toulouse, 2013); Jean-Baptiste Renault, Originaux et cartulaires dans la Lorraine médiévale (XIIe-XVIe siècles): Recueil d’études (Turnhout, 2016); Véronique Lamazou-Duplan and Eloisa Ramírez Vaquero, Les cartulaires médiévaux: Écrire et conserver la mémoire du pouvoir, le pouvoir de la mémoire / Los cartularios medievales: Escribir y conserver la memoria del poder, el poder de la memoria (Pau, 2013). The publication of a 2015 conference in Frankfurt--“Cartulaires: témoins et acteurs de ‘mises en ordre’ / Kartulare im Spiegel sozialer und schriftlicher Ordnung (9.-14. Jahrhundert),”
organized by Claire de Cazanove--has not yet been announced.
2. ehu.eus/galicano/?l=en
3. Theo Kölzer, Willibald Rosner, and Roman Zehetmayer, eds., Regionale Urkundenbücher (St. Pölten, 2010) is more about the idea of region in the modern edition of documentary collections. Pierre Chastang, Lire, écrire, transcrire: Le travail des rédacteurs de cartulaires en Bas-Languedoc (XIe-XIIIe siècles) (Paris, 2001) [reviewed TMR 04.12.21], often cited here, is a rare monograph that goes beyond a single institution; see also now Joanna Tucker, Reading and Shaping Medieval Cartularies: Multi-Scribe Manuscripts and Their Patterns of Growth: A Study of the Earliest Cartularies of Glasgow Cathedral and Lindores Abbey (Woodbridge, 2020) [reviewed TMR 03.03.21].