Monthly Archives: November 2014

Seminar CCII: the modern decline of Charlemagne

My progress through my ridiculous seminar report backlog now picks up in the summer of this year with none other than old acquaintance and collaborator Charles West, who on 6th May 2014 found himself in Birmingham addressing a new seminar of the Institute of German Studies, the Not the First World War Centenary Seminar, which was concentrating on alternative anniversaries to the one that we aren’t allowed to miss this year. Therefore Charles was brought in to address us on the topic, “Charlemagne and the Future of the European Past”. Now, as it happens, of recent years Charles has ventured onto the Internet himself along with a cadre of colleagues from Sheffield who contribute to their History Matters blog, which I recommend, and thus it is that you don’t have to take my word for it what Charles thinks about this issue, because he had already written something about it here. So I’ll be brief here and refer you over there if you want to debate things.

A perfectly-arranged photograph by Andreas Herrmann of the statue of Charlemagne outside the Rathaus in Aachen

A perfectly-arranged photograph by Andreas Herrmann of the statue of Charlemagne outside the Rathaus in Aachen

The short and essential pitch of what Charles had to say is that Europe used to be a lot more fussed about Charlemagne as a figure of importance than it has now become. Whereas he was the point of origin for the Holy Roman Empire and the man whose achievement in bringing a swathe of Occidental territory under one rule both Napoleon and Hitler expressed an intent to beat, and even after the war still the figurehead of various prizes and speeches intended to foster European unity, this has fallen off of late. In this, the 12th centenary of his death, which has sparked a number of exhibitions and celebrations around the Continent, that at Aachen was expecting only a third as many people as attended a similar exhibition at Paderborn in 1999 (and I’ve no idea how many it in fact got).

Poster for the triple exhibition at Aachen, Karlder Grosse: Macht, Kunst, Schätze

Poster for the triple exhibition at Aachen

Charles put this down to two related things: in the first place, the early European Union was surprisingly close in extent to the territories ruled by Charlemagne (including the British Isles obviously attached but clinging to ideas of sovereignty anyway); Spain, Portugal and Greece kind of sneaked in, Scandinavia in general has some explaining to do but the lines east and south were otherwise close, whereas now that we count Eastern Europe in full and the Baltic States and are dithering over Turkey, the old model no longer fits even slightly. This larger Europe also has no collective history together: this group of countries have never been a unit, even Rome never ruled them all, so appeals to our great common history and its unifying figureheads (of whom, after all, there are few enough if that’s your aim) cease to have anything like as much traction. The whole paper thus served as another reminder that whatever we think we’re doing as historians, our work is put to use by people with political agendas that determine why people are interested, and when those agendas don’t need our work they instead put it out to grass. Charles concluded that the best way we can proceed is to tell the story we have and let it find its own audience, but of course we would also usually like it to find financial support and, well, there has ever been the rub…

TRAME: blowing nobody any good

I have been hoarding interesting links during this period of backlog (at least since the last lot) and at some point I will deluge them upon your terminals, but for now there is one in particular I want to talk about. Long-term readers will know that I have a long-orbit bee in my bonnet about funding grants for developing digital resources that already exist. There seems to be no offender here more prolific than the idea that it would be great to establish a unified catalogue of medieval manuscripts on the Internet, despite the fact that there are so many of those that one of the most established of these portals has officially quit keeping up. This was the frame of mind in which I encountered – I no longer remember how – an Italian initiative called TRAME, Text and Manuscript Transmission of the Middle Ages in Europe, and stubbed this post.

Screen capture of the front page of the TRAME site

Screen capture of the front page of their site, click to enlarge (for reasons given below, I’m not linking through)

Inspection reveals that this is not quite the usual deal, in several ways. Firstly, it seems a much more cooperative and consensual a metacatalogue than one of the previous ones, which intended to scrape online content by aggressive querying (not how they put it, but still true) and present it through their own portal; on this one you as manuscript-holding institution have to opt in, and they encourage you so to do. Secondly, it is collecting not actual digitised manuscripts but digitised catalogues of manuscripts. The first of these might be expected to limit their scope, though Italy seems to be good at these digital alliances. The second, however, greatly increases it: lots more such catalogues exist than do new manuscript digitisation efforts, so they are able, having mapped the incoming database to their own (a project in which I suspect I recognise the hands of the Università di Firenze), to present really quite a lot of data. On the other hand, because of the first that data is of quite varied quality and because of the second, ultimately all it is is a manuscript finding aid, not an actual repository.

I did a very quick test case that illustrates the issues. Firstly, my Italian not being so great and me not having really read the instructions, I tried just the word «aprisio» in the search box, but it returned nothing, so I bethought myself of metadata not data and started plugging possible author names in. I was searching, you may guess, for things Catalan and the surprising thing is that I found some. Slightly more surprising to me was that some turned out to be at the Escorial library in Madrid, which I didn’t think had any manuscripts digitised, and this is about the point where I discovered that we are dealing only with catalogue entries. But I persevered because there is really only one manuscript about the Escorial I know anything about, Z.II.2, which is the judge Bonhom’s copy of the adapted Visigothic Law.1 It is there, but all you get is the shelf-mark, so, well, what use is this?

It’s not as if asking the Escorial’s website gets you anything better, of course: its search engine breaks under the simplest query and if you poke far enough into their site you find what purports to be a download of their 1910 catalogue of Latin manuscripts that actually comrpises only the Prologue of its first volume.2 So there is probably less use TRAME could be, but it gets worse. Another example. Having with my first search established that there were manuscripts in this database from the Biblioteca de l’Universitat de Barcelona, I made it show me everything they had there, and this is revealing. Firstly it’s replicated between constituent databases a lot, some manuscripts appearing in several, but it’s the nature of those databases that makes me cross. For this search, lots comes from a resource called BISLAM, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Latinorum Medii Recentiorisque Aevi, which is available through the portal with which the whole effort apparently started, a subscription service called MIRAbile.3 And what that means is that all you can get from a given search in it is an entry like the below and an invitation to subscribe for more information.

Screen capture of a MIRAbile database entry without subscription

There are those of us who would call this spam, and I’m really quite surprised that they got public funding thus to funnel people to their own pay-site. This seems to be the model of all the databases they connect, in fact. And since one of those databases, MSS-b, appears to be a citation index for manuscripts that, unless you have a subscription to that, gives you only single citations of manuscripts in scholarly literature but neither a verified shelfmark for the manuscript nor any part of the relevant scholarly publication. Again, what use is this? I would submit, not a whole lot.

Screen capture of a subscription-less MSS-b database entry

In fact, unless you really need to know a selection of odd mentions of the manuscript you work on and have a research library of international calibre to find them in, the only real use I can see for TRAME is to funnel your money towards their electronic subscription services. Presumably it’s this proud use of public money that means that the ‘costs’ page just links out to a parent body’s homepage and that there has been no news on this project’s website for nearly two years. I’m surprised and disappointed to find that one of their partners is the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, and rather sorry to find any universities involved with it at all. May it have made no-one rich!

1. Text printed as Jesús Alturo i Perucho, Joan Bellès, Josep M. Font Rius, Yolanda García & Anscari Mundó (edd.), Liber iudicum popularis. Ordenat pel jutge Bonsom de Barcelona (Barcelona 2003), and online for free here, but I’d still like to be able to virtually see the manuscript.

2. P. Guillermo Antolín (ed.), Catálogo de los códices latinos de la Real Biblioteca de l’Escorial (Madrid 1910), 5 vols.

3. Roberto Gamberini (ed.), BISLAM. Bibliotheca Scriptorum Latinorum Medii Recentiorisque Aevi. Repertory of Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Authors (Firenze 2003-2010), 3 vols & CD-ROM, which I’m sure is a very useful thing in its way but not free.

‘We saw with our eyes and heard with our ears…’

I’m sorry for the unintended hiatus here over the last few days. It turns out that a week in which you start teaching a new hitherto-unfamiliar primary text in two volumes and initiate work on two separate projects outside your main job as well as going to three seminars and a football match (but a football match with medievalists, I should insist) just isn’t very compatible with blogging. Who knew? You will, of course, hear about not just the projects but also the primary text and what I read round it at least a little bit, but the post I have been meaning to finish, and now do, is one more about the gift that keeps on giving, Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil.1

Cover of Josep María Salrach's Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l'any mil (Vic 2013)

Cover of Josep María Salrach’s Justícia i poder en Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013)

The last one of these posts, you may recall, involved the process for replacing lost documents under Visigothic law, reparatio scripturae, as applied in Catalonia. As I said then, the documents that record such events involve quite detailed reprises of documents sometimes from many years before, and this has led to scepticism that such details could in fact have been genuinely present in the old documents, rather than recovered from the contemporary situation and artifically gilded with the antiquity of presumed memory.2 But as with other such questions, while he doesn’t obviously know that it’s being asked, Salrach has an answer to this, at least potentially. Picking up on the Cuixà hearing I quoted last time and the way its witnesses say that they had read and re-read the missing documents when they existed (quite recently), he argues that probably anyone who had charters got them read out to audiences every now and then so that they would be remembered.3

The volumes of Calaixs 6 & 9 of the Arxiu Episcopal de Vic

I don’t have a picture of the actual document so that you can read it, alas, but it is physically within one of these volumes

Now this obviously makes sense in some ways: it would explain the level of recall that Bowman finds implausible, and certainly this is not the only place where witnesses say such a thing, though the usual phrase is less literate, “we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears”. And there is, as you may just recall, one case where this process is actually documented, at the cathedral of Vic in the year 898. There, one Boso himself took an oath as to the content of several charters he’d lost involving land sold him by two couples, Ermoarí and Farelda and Domènec and Guisilda, and then got five witnesses to testify under oath that they had seen this done. And so they duly say:

“We the above-written witnesses know, and well recall in truth, and saw with our eyes and our ears heard, or we were also present at that hour while those two people, by name the late Domènec and his wife Guisilda and Ermoarí and his wife Farelda, were in the county of Osona, in the term of Taradell, in the hamlet of Gaudilà. And thus made the late Domènec a little charter or sale to the man by the name of Boso, of all his heredity which he had in the county of Osona within the limits of the castle of Taradell or in the hamlet of Gaudilà, and Ermoarí with his wife Farelda sold all their lands or a house, all their heredity in Gaudilà’s hamlet to that same Boso. And we witnesses saw the selfsame documents confirmed and impressed with the sign of the man by the name of Domènec and his wife…”

… and it goes on into what I tend to call non-exclusion clauses, in which every sort of property that the estates concerned might have included is named so that nothing can be claimed as omitted.4 But what’s interesting here is where it goes next, which is to what happened to the documents:

“And we witnesses were signatories making marks in the little charter of Ermoarí, and there was recorded there the notary Joan the priest. We witnesses saw the selfsame documents confirmed and corroborated and impressed with the sign of the sellers, Domènec and his wife and of Ermoarí and his wife, and of the audience and of the chancellor just as is inserted above. And we saw the selfsame documents handed over into the power of that same Boso and I the already-said Domènec and his wife and Ermoarí and his wife handed them over of their own spontaneous will into the power of the selfsame Boso. And we witnesses saw and heard the selfsame documents read and re-read one and another and a third time in the hamlet of Gaudilà. And that same Boso had the selfsame lost documents, and it was evident.”

What Salrach of course picks up on is the reference to a repeated reading. Again this makes perfect sense as a way that things could have been done, and as I’ve said elsewhere it’s a real pity that we can’t trust it…5 The reason that we can’t is the notary and the chancellor; these are the only documents in the whole of Carolingian Catalonia as far as I know, and certainly in this county, that mention such officers. Obviously the documents had a scribe, but neither of these is likely to be a title they used. That means that the scribe of these documents, a priest by the name of Ademir, had another model in use from somewhere, and that no procedural detail included in these documents can be proven to come from life rather than the model. And this is the only text we have that mentions this re-reading on site…

Cathedral of Sant Pere de vic seen from the Riu Gurri

The cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic, from the Riu Gurri, where with a rather different and presumably smaller building on site this all took place. By Enfo (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Of course this doesn’t take away Salrach’s point. If the recall (which sometimes goes well beyond the likely: we have the name of one of the Muslim governors operating in Catalonia before the Muslim conquest from one of the Cuixà document replacements, whose forty-year-old original had apparently recorded a century of tenure history!6) is to be accepted, it needs explaining; here is a perfectly good explanation, even if it probably isn’t what actually happened here. So when would this hypothetical reading have taken place? There is a contention made by people who work on monastic cartularies that these, functioning as memorials of donors, would have been read out on solemn occasions in the monastery, such as particular feast days, and the same could just about be true of secular churches, if they picked a day when a good crowd would be there.7 But should we imagine similar opportunities being taken in the lay world? There would be no fixed points of the calendar outwith the liturgy for the lay population, so the occasion would have to be generated, either by the agricultural year or by one-off events, which it seems odd to picture being co-opted for this purpose. Everyone’s here for the wedding or whatever, let’s quickly get the charters out and run through ’em? And who could run through formulaic Latin documents for such an audience anyway? There is, most likely, an evidentially silent practice of public land-speaking here that these procedures imply, but do not prove. The case is not made by Salrach, but it seems to me that the combination of these various cases does make it stronger. I would have liked more from him on this!

1. J. M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil, Referències 55 (Vic 2013).

2. Jeffrey Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: property, proof and dispute in Catalonia around the year 1000 (Ithaca 2004), pp. 151-161.

3. Salrach, Justícia i poder, p. 195, referring to Pierre Ponsich (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia VI: els comtats de Rosselló, Conflent, Vallespir i Fenollet, rev. Ramon Ordeig i Mata, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LXX (Barcelona 2006), 2 vols, doc. no. 121.

4. The two documents from the hearing are edited as Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. nos 33 & 34, the latter here quoted in my translation. The cataloguic property listings are discussed by Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIe siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, I pp. 208-217.

5. J. Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (University of London 2005), online here, pp. 49-53.

6. Salrach, Justícia i poder, 195, without further reference, but the document is Ponsich, Catalunya Carolíngia VI, doc. no. 120, with the actual content here referred to printed as its own entry as no. 23.

7. Patrick Geary, “Entre gestion et gesta” in Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle & Michel Parisse (edd.), Les Cartulaires : Actes de la Table Ronde organisée par l’École Nationale des Chartes et le G. D. R. 121 du C. N. R. S. (Paris, 5-7 décembre 1991), Mémoires et Documents de l’École des Chartes 39 (Paris 1993), pp. 13-26; see also Geary, “Land, Language and Memory in Europe 700-1100” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th Series Vol. 9 (Cambridge 1999), pp. 169-184.