This volume, the latest in the flood of conference volumes on the subject of cartularies that has followed the seminal 1991 École des chartes workshop [1], emerged from a colloquium for younger researchers held in 2015 at the Institut franco-allemand de sciences historiques et sociales in Frankfurt. After a gap of nearly a decade, the researchers are less young, but the scholarship remains relatively fresh. The core of the volume comprises the seven papers--four in French, two in German, one English--of the thendoctorants and post-docs.
Lucie Troyen Laloum details the copying of royal monograms in diplomas found in two cartularies of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Livre noir (1120s-1230s) and the Petit pastoral (1239). By comparing the monograms from some three dozen surviving originals with their versions in the two cartularies (all nicely reproduced in sharp photographs in an appendix), she argues that while in the first cartulary monograms partially retained their original function as marks of authentication, in the second they have become less signs and more ornaments that fit into a new “visual rhetoric” of the cathedral chapter, one seen in other thirteenth-century codices and possibly influenced by books of magic.
Jean-Baptiste Renault explores the documentary relationship between Saint-Victor de Marseille and the various Provençal churches that it gained control of through lay restitutions, mostly in the eleventh century. Some of the churches’ documents were absorbed into the archive of the monastery; others were copied and left in place; many, but far from all, made their way into the Grand cartulaire (s. 11-12). The careful geographical and chronological reconstruction of waves of transfer and copying and hypotheses about rationales behind various choices on display here point to the usefulness of attention to “exogenous” and “inherited” documents as part of the archaeology of cartularies.
Claire de Cazanove Hannecourt’s work on the ninth- and tenth-century East Frankish cartularies (Passau, Regensburg, Freising, Mondsee, Fulda, Weißenburg, and Werden, along with a less well-known fragment from Müstair [2]) is now better accessed through her monograph. [3] Her contribution here focuses, again, on the “exogenous” ecclesiastical documents that they include; what is lost by the inability to work with originals is made up for by the ability to work comparatively. She notes that these documents tend to be not grouped separately (save at Freising), but integrated into the general organization of the cartulary; that the rationale for inclusion might lie in a range of juridical relationships or entirely personal ones; and that they show a concern for the place of “third parties” in the memoria of an institution.
The cartulary of Saint-Croix de Quimperlé (c. 1120)--less well-known than the other two early Breton cartularies, from Redon and Landévennec--draws interest as it contains not just copies of charters, but saints lives and a chronicle, as well as a preface by the compiler, the monk Gurheden. [3] Cyprien Henry offers an interpretation of the logic of this collection, with respect to both its individual parts and the whole. He shows first how it combines juridical and memorial functions, but then how a closer examination of the collection of charters itself reveals a process of structuring Quimperlé’s territory. He suggests cleverly that all these elements can be combined using the concept of “space-time,” although his embrace of the idea of polysemy seems more solid.
Returning to the East Frankish region, Thomas Kohl focuses on the first cartulary of Fulda and the Freising cartulary compiled by Cozroh, both of which can be dated to the decade following 824 and linked with important Carolingian court figures. He argues that the emergence of cartularies at this precise point may be tied not just to the Carolingian reform project generally, but to the crisis conditions of the 820s, bookended by the penance of Louis the Pious in 822 and the reform synods of 829, the same period that saw the Polyptych of Irminon and a cartulary project at Regensburg. Drawing heavily on Cozroh’s prologue, he presents the cartularies as a form of correctio: restoration and improvement of the memory of institutional donors and their gifts reflects the same impulse as the restoration and improvement of Biblical and liturgical texts.
F. C. W. Goosmann takes a narrower approach, focusing on the thirty-two property records (out of close to four thousand) in the Codex Laureshamenses (late s. 12) that document Lorsch’s distant holdings in the Low Countries, almost all from the eighth and ninth centuries. The Codex combines a chronologically-ordered “chronicle cartulary” and a later, geographically-ordered “copybook”; the relevant charters are found in both sections in various forms, most in a coherent group of twenty-two documents that likely reproduces earlier, Carolingian and Ottonian collections, and another group added in abbreviated form at the very end of the codex. Goosmann offers another example of an archaeological analysis of a cartulary, developing an argument that makes archival and historical sense of the placement of these documents.
Drawing on a diverse source base of a dozen works from the Swabian region in the twelfth century, Johannes Waldschütz undertakes to dismantle the typological distinction between (to use the terms from his title) Traditionsbuch,Klosterchronik, Kartular(chronik), and Güterverzeichnis. He convincingly demonstrates that, when issues such as authorship, intention, and relationship to underlying documents are considered, the various sources do not correspond to the ideal generic types. He balances this with the suggestion borrowed from hagiography that we think in terms of overlapping discourses: possessory, administrative, sacral-memorial, hagiographical, and historical and identity-forming, the relative importance of which in a source can shift over time.
The last of these contributions is the most methodologically ambitious and points to larger issues about cartulary scholarship that are addressed more extensively in the essays at the start and the end of the collection by more senior scholars, distinguished cartulary experts all. Laurent Morelle offers a masterful and sprawling essay (alone worth the price of admission) that situates the individual contributions in the broad sweep of the historiography of cartularies over the past three decades. He groups his trenchant observations around genre, the relationship to the underlying archive, the role of the compiler, and the nature of the cartulary itself. The first part of Sébastien Barret’s essay offers a complementary reading of the history of cartulary scholarship, focusing on the case of Cluny. The second half is an important consideration of interpretative difficulties, making the vital points, among many others, that we should consider that a lot of our evidence may simply represent failed undertakings, and that many cartularies have surely been lost, which has implications for our reading of those that survive. Pierre Chastang’s conclusion briefly attempts another loose synthesis of the central papers, reinforcing points about privileging materiality and specificity over typology, the polysemy of cartularies, and the significance of exogenous records for understanding institutional memory and documentary culture.
This collection offers promising indications that the study of cartularies is evolving beyond the program set forth in 1991. The implicit East and West Frankish comparison and the juxtaposition here of sources from the ninth into the thirteenth century are important elements in that evolution. Of course there are cartularies from still later centuries, too, and the canvas of medieval documentary practices extends well beyond the geographical frame here. The acts of a more geographically and chronologically expansive colloquium held in 2024 at the École française de Rome (featuring again Barret, Morelle, Chastang, and De Cazanove Hannecart) will surely carry this scholarship forward. [5]
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Notes
1. See TMR 21.11.27, note 1.
2. Peter Erhart and Julia Kleindienst, eds., Urkundenlandschaft Rätien, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 7 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2004), 151-59.
3. Claire de Cazanove Hannecourt, Du chartrier au codex: La première cartularisation (IXe–début Xe siècle), Haut Moyen Âge, 50 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025).
4. Cyprien Henry, Joëlle Quaghebeur, and Bernard Tanguy, eds., Cartulaire de Saint-Croix de Quimperlé, Sources médiévales de l’histoire de Bretagne, 4 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).
5. “Des copies aux cartulaires: La table ronde ‘Cartulaires’ trente(-trois) ans après,” École française de Rome, Rome, 28-31 October 2024.