Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages

Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, Adam Kosto

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781107025295
• eBook ISBN: 9781139848251
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Lay archives in the Late Antique and Byzantine East: the implications of the documentary papyri
• 3 Public administration, private individuals and the written word in Late Antique North Africa, c. 284-700
• 4 Lay documents and archives in early medieval Spain and Italy, c. 400-700
• 5 The gesta municipalia and the public validation of documents in Frankish Europe
• 6 Laypeople and documents in the Frankish formula collections
• 7 Archives, documents and landowners in Carolingian Francia
• 8 The production and preservation of documents in Francia: the evidence of cartularies
• 9 The laity, the clergy, the scribes and their archives: the documentary record of eighth- and ninth-century Italy
• 10 Sicut mos esse solet: documentary practices in Christian Iberia, c. 700-1000
• 11 On the material culture of legal documents: charters and their preservation in the Cluny archive, ninth to eleventh centuries
• 12 Documentary practices, archives and laypeople in central Italy, mid ninth to eleventh centuries
• 13 Archives and lay documentary practice in the Anglo-Saxon world
• 14 Conclusion
• Index