Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages

This revealing study explores how people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, needed, used and kept documents.

Warren Brown (Edited by), Marios Costambeys (Edited by), Matthew Innes (Edited by), Adam Kosto (Edited by)

9781107025295, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 November 2012

406 pages, 3 b/w illus. 2 tables
23.1 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.72 kg

'Taken as a group, these essays demonstrate important continuities and changes in lay documentary practice from late antiquity up through the high Middle Ages. There is new information and new ideas, including agendas for future work that need to be explored in order to develop a more sophisticated appreciation of early medieval documentary practice. The volume also offers solutions, indicating for example new ways in which the dichotomies of public-private and lay-clerical could be reinterpreted.' Marco Stoffella, Early Medieval Europe

Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages - from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England - people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.

1. Introduction
2. Lay archives in the Late Antique and Byzantine East: the implications of the documentary papyri Peter Sarris
3. Public administration, private individuals and the written word in Late Antique North Africa, c.284–700 Jonathan P. Conant
4. Lay documents and archives in early Medieval Spain and Italy, c.400–700 Nicholas Everett
5. The gesta municipalia and the public validation of documents in Frankish Europe Warren C. Brown
6. Lay people and documents in the Frankish formula collections Warren C. Brown
7. Archives, documents and landowners in Carolingian Francia Matthew Innes
8. The production and preservation of documents in Francia: the evidence of cartularies Hans Hummer
9. The laity, the clergy, the scribes and their archives: the documentary record of eighth- and ninth-century Italy Marios Costambeys
10. Sicut mos esse solet: documentary practices in Christian Iberia, c.700–1000 Adam J. Kosto
11. On the material culture of legal documents: charters and their preservation in the Cluny archive, ninth to eleventh centuries Matthew Innes
12. Documentary practices, archives and lay people in central Italy (mid-ninth to eleventh centuries) Antonio Sennis
13. Archives and lay documentary practice in the Anglo-Saxon world Charles Insley
14. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], History [HB]