Tracing medieval women in documents and manuscripts

Manuscript with the trial of Jeanne d’Arc, 1431; written 15D/16A century – London, British Library, Egerton 984, f. 3r – image British Library

Some subjects deserve highlighting in general within historical research. On several occasions I therefore present here contributions on major themes in legal history such as justice and injustice, slavery and discrimination. Women’s history, too, should figure here more often. It took me some time to look carefully at the results of a special digitization project finished earlier this year by the British Library. In March 2023 an overview of some ninety manuscripts was presented in a PDF, and in May a further overview was added for more than 200 newly digitized charters and 25 rolls. Adding these archival records greatly strenghtens this project by bringing even more depth and width. Charters and rolls appear here almost every year. In fact I had to restrict myself severely and to choose only some subjects and items touching upon legal history to make this post worth some of your reading time, and wet your appetite for more. Earlier on in fact I wrote here about digitized legal manuscripts of the British Library, and about the project with the Bibliothèque nationale de France for digitizing manuscripts created in England and France from the period 800 to 1200.

Making women visible

The first thing to note about the two sections of this digitisation project is that the British Library (BL) included also manuscripts and documents from the Renaissance, enlarging the period covered to the year 1600. On three occasions the BL’s Medieval Manuscripts blog alerted to the completion of the two series. On March 25, 2023 the overview for the manuscrips was presented, with a notice work on charters and rolls was nearly finished. The second post (May 11, 2023) announced the completion of the work on the rolls and charters. In the third post (May 21, 2023) not only links to the two PDF’s are given, but also to versions in Excel. It goes without saying these posts contain marvellous images for the digitized manuscripts, charters and rolls. For some women figuring in this project the BL created separate pages presenting their lives and the newly digitized materials concerning them.

Let me start with admitting that although I found it really difficult and even unfair to select here just some examples showing the wealth of materials newly digitised within this project I could not help delving deeper into the background of two manuscripts about a rather famous woman from the fifteenth century. As a matter of fact I concluded one manuscript really deserves mentioning, because it is not mentioned at one of the main websites about her.

However, I would like to start to look here first more in general at the digitized manuscripts stemming from and concerning medieval women. Most interestingly, you will find in the manuscript section also manuscripts which are actually archival records. This fact makes it more natural for the BL to add charters and rolls as a second section to this project. In order not to focus only on individual women I will look here first at some documentary genres. For this project the BL has digitized in this section four cartularies, three of them of monastic institutions, from Stixwould Priory (Add. 46701), Wilton Abbey (Harley 436), and Coldstream Priory in Scotland (Harley 6670), The fourth cartulary stems from John de Vaux and his daughter and co-heiress Petronilla de Narford (Stowe 776). There is a manuscript containing a census from St Mary Magdalene’s Abbey in Cologne (Add. 21072), and from this institution comes also a manuscript with revenues and expenses (Add. 21177).

Very much in a royal lineage are two wardrobe accounts, the first for Eleanor of Castile for the years1289 and 1290 (Add. 35294), including expenses for her funeral, and for Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, sons of Edward I and Margaret of France (Add. 37656), although the last manuscript is clearly concerned with two men expending sometimes money for women at court. The manuscript with patents granted by king Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn stems from her period as marquess of Pembroke (1532-1533) (Harley 303). Another manuscript contains the receipts and expenses for the expedition bringing queen Margaret of Anjou to England in 1444 and 1445 (Add. 23938). The manuscript Royal 17 B XXVIII, compiled between 1536 and 1581, is a book of expenses of Princess Mary, containing also an inventory of her jewels, and a catalogue of printed books in the Royal Library. A bit more personal perhaps is a letter written on a single leaf by Mary, Queen of Scots, to Jacques Bochetel de la Forest, the French ambassador to queen Elizabeth I from 1568 (Add. 89480), preserved with an engraving showing Mary. To end this royal section I would like to mention the manuscript Stowe 784 with a Complainte sur la mort d’Anne de Bretagne followed by a discours on the mariage of Anne de Foix with king Ladislas of Hungary in 1514.

We arrive straight into legal history with the last two manuscripts I want to mention here. With my selection of fifteen items with a content more or less relevant for legal historians from a total of ninety digitized manuscripts the British Library certainly serves legal historians. Actually these two last manuscripts are quite famous examples of records of trials dominated by the use of medieval canon law. It is fair to say these manuscripts play a major royal in our knowledge about and perception of an iconic trial.

Last page of the nullification trial with the notarial confirmation of the first notary; written 1455-1456- London, BL, Stowe 84, fol. 182r (detail) – image British Library

Those readers which read the caption under the first manuscript image in this post saw already the name Joan of Arc. The British Library digitized two manuscripts, Egerton 984, with the proceedings of the trial held in Rouen in 1431, written in the last quarter of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Stowe 84, an official copy of the proceedings of the rehabilitation trial in 1455-1456. At the portal Jeanne d’Arc the section on the trials tells you a lot about the manuscripts sources, editions and modern translations, but one of the manuscripts at the British Library, Egerton 984, once owned by Pierre Pithou, is somehow forgotten. It is tempting to provide you here with an overview of the manuscript tradition and modern editions, but this takes more space than I had expected. It is far more important to note the absence of any primary source for the interrogation held in Poitiers, the distance in time to the events of the manuscripts concerning the trial in 1431, and the closeness and official nature of the manuscripts concerning the second trial in 1455-1456, often called the rehabilitation or nullification trial. I created a PDF with an overview of the manuscripts and their digitized versions, and information about the most important editions.

Rolls and charters

The second section with digitized rolls and charters does bring you anyway a lot of legal documents featuring women in many capacities. The sheer number of some document genres prohibits their full selection here. There are for example 23 wills, 15 quitclaims (renunciations of right(s)), and nearly 90 grants. Eight rolls tell you about households, and nine chirographs have been digitized. Eight documents tell us about expenses for households. Seventeen documents concern medieval and sixteenth-century queens, and 27 documents mention a countess. It is definitively a challenge to show here women not only doing things they very obviously regularly could do and did, but also showing more exceptional cases, not forgetting to give a balanced view of social status and the origin of these archival records. With 200 charters and 25 rolls you are sure to find something touching your own personal or professional interests.

Sale of an enslaved woman, 1450 – BL, Add. Ch 15340 (upper half) – image British Library

Many documents concern land transactions, but another attraction caught my attention. Add, Ch. 15340 is a notarial act recording the sale in 1450 by two Venetian men of an enslaved Russian woman named Marta to Angelo Gadi from Florence. Alas the act contains few details in the lines 7 to 9 about this sclava, who was 22 years old and healthy of body and mind.

There is a huge difference between this woman treated as an object for sale, a victim of slavery, and women founding institutions. Between 1237 and 1241 Ela, countess of Salisbury, founded Lacock Abbey (Add, Ch. 75578). Empress Matilda founded Bordesley Abbey between 1141-1142, overruling the original founder Waleran, count of Meulan who acted as a witness in this charter (Add. Ch. 75724). In a further charter from 1141 she confirmed a grant of lamds to this abbey (Add. Ch. 20420). Matilda was also a benefactor of Reading Abbey (Add. Ch. 19576, 19577, 19578 and 17579). Margery de Crek founded Flixton Priory in Suffolk in the years 1258-1259 (Stowe Ch. 291). Confirmations of her foundation followed quickly (Stowe Ch. 292, 293 and 294; LFC Ch. V 15) as did even a royal gift of land (Stowe Ch. 296), interestingly for having a warren, a terrain with rabbits. The more remarkable charter about Flixton Priory is the confirmation by a widow of receiving lands in 1263 for her dowry from the prioress of this institution (Stowe 305). Among the Stowe documents are eleven records with transactions concerning three monasteries in Brescia. Not as a founder, but as protector to a university acted queen Juana de Castile who put her seal to a charter establishing her in this role in 1510 for the university of Alcalà de Henares (Egerton Ch. 127).

Even when I will not unduly focus here on queens and countesses you can find glimpses from their surroundings as well. There is a successful petition by a nurse serving king Henry VI to double her yearly salary in 1424 from £ 20 to £ 40 (Stowe Ch. 643). A very different petition was sent to pope Calixtus III (1455-1458) by Vaggia, widow of Bernardo de Bardi from Florence, to gain permission for herself and her two daughters to have their confessor celebrate mass with a portable altar during an interdict and similar ecclesiastical measures (Add. Ch. 67089). By the way, the description in the overview of this document mentions pope Celestine III, but the description in the online catalogue notes the right pope. A third petition in 1455 comes from queen Margaret of Anjou to her husband, king Henry VI, about sums to be given to her through the Exchequer (Cotton Ch. XVI 72). Another document shows Margaret of Anjou in another role. She was taken prisoner in 1471 and delivered safely to king Louis XI of France in 1476 after he had paid a ransom of 50,000 crowns (Add, Ch. 13932). Margaret had been kept in custody by Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk, formerly her lady-in-waiting. This is of course also an example of a woman figuring in both series of specially digitized documents.

One particular category of documents deserves here a bit more attention, even if it leads to inevitably arbitrary choices. I myself frowned when realizing the fifteen quitclaims contain renunciations of a right or rights. In what cases did women cede rights, and to whom did they renounce a particular right or some rights? The overview mentions almost always cases concerning rights to land ceded to either men or religious institutions. The term quitclaim is indeed reserved to cases concerning rights on lands or rents. One case involves a renunciation by Gonorra in the mid-thirteenth century of half a rent owned on lands given to a hospital in Southwark by her late husband William Bannastre (Add. Ch 23674). To this charter her seal is affixed, a reminder to look for seals of women and the way women are depicted on seals. Seven documents mention a rent or rents.

Let’s end an admittedly restricted choice of items in the second series with some documents which are in my view truly exceptional in the selection made by the British Library. Stowe Ch. XXXII 13 is a chirograph from 1355 with an arbitration by Thomas of Hampstead between Lady Katherine and her son John Latimer about her right to access the chapel at Braybrooke Castle. Another arbitration is found in Add. Ch. 28654. In 1352 an agreement was made about the access for the canons of Sankt Maria im Kapitol, Cologne, to the monastery led by abbess Elizabeth von Katzenellnbogen at this institution when they had to visit the chapter house. The arbiters confirmed in Latin an earlier verdict given in German included in this charter. Add. Ch. 27703 contains a covenant from 1380 between Joan, dowager of Wales, widow of Edward known as the Black Prince, and the community of Beverley in Yorkshire to pay to her an annual rent granted earlier to a kinswoman.

Finally it is sensible to note the only lawsuit among the newly digitized documents, a roll from the last decade of the fourteenth century with documents from of a case heard at Salisbury Cathedral between the abbess and convent of Canonsleigh Priory and parishioners of Morden, Dorset (Add. Ms. 52913). In 1392 the vicar-general of Salisbury judged in favor of the parishioners who had claimed the convent had failed to do an annual payment to the poor, forbidden them to cut woods in the cemetery, and the convent had diverted fruits from the parish church contrary to canon law to a layman.

Women in many roles

I did not write here about the four documents in the second series touching in some way on Flanders, and I have also skipped the manuscripts with rules and statutes. I did spot manuscripts from the Northern Netherlands, but these do not have a legal content. I could have delved into the many wills and grants, and looked in detail for the various motives formulated in these documents. I am afraid no one can present in a single blog post everything that makes this project so interesting! The British Library has made a fine selection of manuscripts and documents enriching our knowledge and helping us to ask questions about medieval women and their lives. Connecting some of the manuscripts with archival records and vice versa is just one of the possible routes to follow. Some archival records could equally be prized possessions of the National Archives, Kew or other record offices in the United Kingdom and even abroad.

It is only logical I could not open every window offered here, but I urge anyone to look at length and with lots of questions to the two overviews and the special web pages for some women to gain new insights into medieval lives and afterlife, not in the least to the legal sides of women’s lives to be found in these manuscripts and archival records. Any selection has its limits, but I think this project of the British Library is truly a gem.

Rays of light on illuminated legal manuscripts

At the start of a new academic year scholarly events, too, start to occur, sometimes already again as live events, but more often as online meetings of scholars. From September 22 to 25, 2021 an online conference took place concerning The illuminated legal manuscript from the Middle Ages to the digital age. Forms, iconographies, materials, uses and cataloguing. Three institutions cooperated to organize this event, the Ius Illuminatum research team led by Maria Alessandra Bilotta (Lisbon), the Biblioteca capitolare di Vercelli and the Biblioteca capitolare di Verona. With its eight sessions and various key note lectures on different themes connected with medieval legal manuscripts and art history this conference addressed a wider audience than just art historians and specialists in legal iconography or medieval book production, and thus fit for a post here. Last week my own time schedule made it impossible for me to follow all sessions, and therefore only a number of themes will come into the spotlights here. Hopefully other participants, too, will report on this interesting event.

Focus on the Mediterranean

Surely one of the most visible aspects of this conference is the partnership for this conference between scholars and two libraries crossing national borders. The Ius Illuminatum team at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa is known for the research by Maria Alessandra Bilotta on medieval illuminated legal manuscripts created in Southern France, in particular in Toulouse. The library in Vercelli is famous for the Vercelli Mappamundi, the Vercelli Book with texts in Anglo-Saxon, and two manuscripts containing the Leges Langobardorum. The library in Verona is renown for its holdings with a number of medieval manuscripts and in particular palimpsests as unique witnesses to texts form classical Antiquity, foremost among them the Institutes of Gaius. Both libraries have also a museum. A live virtual tour of the library in Vercelli focusing on two manuscripts was a nice addition to the conference.

Let’s briefly look at the themes of the sessions. Manuscripts held in Salamanca, manuscripts from France kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, legal manuscripts in Salamanca and Naples were the subject of the first session centered around libraries. In the second section a number of individual case studies were grouped together. The third section focused on legal iconography. The cataloguing of (illuminated) legal manuscripts was the theme in the fourth session. The fifth session with just one contribution looked at vulgarisation of law. Medieval city statutes were presented in the sixth session. Two special sessions were devoted respectively to the materiality of illuminated legal manuscripts and to the connection of heraldry to medieval law and illuminated manuscripts. In my view bringing together these themes is already most useful to raise awareness about their interconnections and limitations.

A number of keynote lectures could theoretically be placed within a particular session, but it was perhaps right to set them apart. The lecture by Susanne Wittekind (Universität Köln) stands out for its dense information and insightful comparison of the manuscript illumination in the Codex Albedensis, a tenth-century manuscript at the Escorial with at first sight just a miscellaneous collection of texts, and the Tercer Llibre Verd, a manuscript with statutes of Barcelona, also discussed by Rose Alcoy (Universitat de Barcelona). The miscellany is in fact a well-structured manuscript showing graphically a legal and graphic order of legal and religious texts. Making comparisons and structuring your presentation were elements definitely missing in some presentations without the use of slides, as was being aware of the limited number of themes you can address within thirty minutes, and awareness of the need for structure and clear questions.

The importance of repertories and catalogues

One of the limitations for studying medieval legal illuminated manuscripts is the state of catalogues and repertories for this genre. It was therefore most welcome to hear a lecture by Gero Dolezalek (University of Aberdeen) on the current state of affairs of the Manuscripta Juridica database in Frankfurt am Main. Only a few canon law manuscripts have yet been entered in this database originally devised for manuscripts with Roman legal texts and commentaries up to 1600. Sadly it seems little progress has been made in the past few years. Illumination has not been consequently recorded. At Turin Maria Alessandra Panzanelli Fratoni is working at two interrelated projects, a new portal called IVS Commune Online, to be launched in October 2021, with an integration of data on manuscripts and early printed editions from existing online resources, and a new section of the Italian manuscript portal MANUS, called MANUSIuridica. The main strengths of these two promising projects are the thorough conceptual preparation. It is not yet clear when MANUSIuridica will become accessible. In this section Andrea Padovani (Bologna) talked about the new phase and face of the project Irnerio with digitized legal manuscripts at the Colegio di Spagna in Bologna – presented here many years ago – and Silvio Pucci (independent scholar) about the online version of the catalogue for the juridical manuscripts at the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati in Siena.

It is important to remember the study of medieval canon law still faces the lack of a full manuscript repertory, a paradoxical fact after the appearance of the model given by Stephan Kuttner in his Repertorium der Kanonistik 1140-1234, I, Prodromus glossarum (Città del Vaticano, 1937). Was his level simply too high to follow for others, or did it simply led to a strong and not completely justifiable focus on the classic period of medieval canon law? Luckily we have for the early Middle Ages the excellent guide by Lotte Kéry, Canonical collections of the Early Middle Ages, ca. 400-1140: A biographical guide to the manuscripts and literature (Washington, DC, 1999).

Legal iconography and heraldry

In the section for the more classic legal iconography papers were read about the illustration of the two powers at the beginning of manuscripts with the Decretum Gratiani (Gianluca del Monaco, Bologna), accompanying the very incipit Humanum genus, the iconography of last wills in some manuscripts of the Institutiones Iustiniani and the Digest (Viviane Persi, Lille), the representation of public justice in the Vidal Mayor (Rogerio Ribeiro Tostes, Evora), and the development of legal iconography in medieval Scandinavia (Stefan Drechsler, Bergen).

The very last section dealt with a subject often associated with medieval law, heraldry and the use of distinctive signs by knights and noble families, but interestingly medieval law did not set clear norms for unique claims on the use of a particular blason or sign. In 2012 I looked here at this very theme. Bartolus de Sassoferrato (1313-1357) did certainly influence later lawyers with his most often copied treatise De insignis et armis, but in particular Martin Sunnqvist (Lunds Universitet) made it refreshingly clear that this treatise does not help us to understand the rise of heraldry from the twelfth century onwards. The lecture of João Portugal (Instituto Português de Heráldica) on Early Modern heraldic rights in Portugal showed essentially how showing a relation with the king was as important as having a official blason at all. Matteo Ferrari (Universit;e de Namur) took us to a painting at the Palazzo di Comune in San Gimignano with a deliberate use of heraldic arms above the text of an important ruling around 1300.

Coutumes de Toulouse, around 1296 – Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. latin 9187, f. 1r (detail) – image BnF

Finally Laurent Macé (Université de Toulouse) looked at the use of earlier blasons from the former county and the counts of Toulouse in a manuscript with the Coutumes de Toulouse from the late thirteenth century (Paris, BnF, ms.latin 9187). Macé argued these blasons and other signs helped showing continuity to readers in a new period under the French crown.

The forest and the trees

Even with only a partial review of lectures and keynotes the variety of this online conference with an attendance between twenty and forty scholars cannot be doubted. For those thinking the choice of subjects is too wide or simply unfocused the contribution of Carlo Federici (Scuola di Biblioteconomia, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) on the archaeology of the book served as a necessary reminder how leading palaeographers and codicologists in the second half of the twentieth century advocated an integral approach of medieval manuscripts, archival records and book production, away from a choice for studying only either texts, scripts, bindings or scriptoria.

The materiality of manuscripts matters indeed. Thus in my view Including a lecture on legal fragments kept at the Archivio di Stato di Arezzo by Maura Mordini (Università di Siena) is not a bow to what someone in 2021 jokingly called the minor industry of studying fragments. Far more often than we are willing to acknowledge we forget you deal with traces and fragments per se when studying history. So many things are irrecoverably lost forever or only seldom in front of us. Not every tiny bit is important, but there are bits and pieces pointing to larger contexts. As for projects with fragments, I try to list relevant projects, catalogues and exhibit catalogues concerning medieval fragments as part of my Glossae blog on pre-accursian glosses.

As for the materiality of an online scholarly event, I would not recommend following the example of organizing a full program of sessions from nine to seven with only brief breaks. The quality of the internet connection forced the permanent closure of the video screens of non-speaking participants, a fact which greatly reduces the interaction. There was no virtual lobby, too. In this respect my view is surely influenced by the example of the online event at Frankfurt am Main on digital legal history in March reviewed here. Ensuring sufficient band width and creating a separate online social platform is perhaps a matter of calling upon the appropriate national institution dealing with such matters, yet another thing rightly taken into consideration by the German organizing team. The teams in LIsbon, Vercelli and Verona deserve respect for bringing together scholars from various disciplines and casting its nets wide. With this in mind you should view my remarks on things that could be better in a second similar conference which will no doubt follow soon. The rays of light on illustrations and illumination at this conference contain a promise of more to come.

Looking at fragments

In December bloggers face the perennial challenge of the seasonal post. In my view 2020 has hardly had any regular season. The world has changed in many ways. What seemed certain has become the object of doubts, and uncertainties have come into the spotlights. I will not pretend to see things better here than anyone else. My Dutch view is no cure for everything!

Like someone standing outside Utrecht University Library you cannot look directly into what’s inside. Our visions are often fragmented, and thus it seems appropriate to look here simply at some fragments of charters and manuscripts I could recently study at the Special Collections of Utrecht University Library. Reporting from field work may not have the same status as presenting glorious final results, but it is in a way closer to tangible objects. Fragments offer a glimpse of a larger whole, and sometimes they are a kind of time capsule. Faithful readers know about my penchant to bring in here every now and then a very particular location, but this time it comes just briefly into view, perhaps only as a possible sequel in 2021.

History in fragments

Once upon a time it was clear a library contained books and an archive archival collections, but this nicely organized world seldom existed in real life. Archives can have a substantial library collection, and a research library can have important archival collections in its holdings. The history of a number of archival collections from medieval institutions and manuscripts held at Het Utrechts Archief and Utrecht University Library is a good example. Generally archival collections can be found now at the combined municipal and provincial archive, and most manuscripts are held at the university library, but some remarkable exceptions exist. Luckily Utrecht University Library created an online repertory for its archival collections. The manuscripts at Het Utrechts Archief can be found in the online library catalogue. Some of these manuscripts have been digitized.

Sometimes there is another explanation. The Wttewaal van Stoetwegen family brought the papers of the Wickenburg estate (‘t Goy, now part of Houten) into the care of Het Utrechts Archief [toegang (finding aid) 254], but other papers and charters are kept since the early twentieth century at the university library. Its inventory lacked descriptions of the charters, After a frst foray it became only natural to describe these charters as a sequel of the fruitful cooperation between both institutions in recent years, in particular for the exhibition and essay volume Perkament in stukken [Parchment in pieces] (2018).

Fragments of charters came also into view in my project which thus goes beyond the eighty charters of the Wttewaal family. A number of charter fragments had been described summarily in Latin in the manuscript catalogue [P.A. Tiele, A. Hulshof and B. Kruitwagen (eds.), Catalogus codicum manu scriptorum Bibliothecae Universitatis Rheno-Trajectinae (2 vol., Utrecht-The Hague, 1887-1909; online, UB Utrecht, vol. I and II)]. The manuscript catalogue and later additions have been integrated into the online library catalogue; a guide for special materials helps you to use the catalogue and other resources efficiently. A substantial number of fragments has been taken from the bindings they once reinforced, some of them without due reference to the host volume, others with clear references to their origin.

Other fragments can in particular be found in situ in bookbindings made for Hubert van Buchel (1513-1599), a canon of the collegiate chapter of St. Mary’s at Utrecht. In 1569 Buchel fled to Cologne. In his will he donated his books to the parish of St. James’ at Utrecht, but no doubt the church wardens must have influenced the final decision to add them to the collections of the city library founded in 1584, the nucleus of the university library founded in 1636. My project was restricted to charter fragments. Vito Santoliquido (ENNSIB, Lyon) recently looked for Fragmentarium at the entire corpus of maculature fragments in books with a Van Buchel provenance, a collection with some 1,000 relevant volumes. I dealt with just over one hundred charter fragments.

For strengthening the bindings of his books Van Buchel provided the bookbinder with parchment and paper from books which might have belonged to the chapter of St. Mary’s. He even jotted down the costs of many bindings. Few manuscripts from this collegiate chapter survive nowadays. The fragments might offer a kind of window on the books held and read by the canons of St. Mary’s at Utrecht. At Fragmentarium Vito Santoliquido gives a sketch of his research project Maculature in the Van Buchel Collection.

It is tempting to continue here with a paragraph about the aims of fragments research. In the past years it has become a discipline with a name of its own, fragmentology, and even a journal with this title, thus claiming its own distinct place next to codicology and palaeography. In the second part of this post I will look at some fragments with a clear connection to legal history. At my blog Glossae. Middeleeuwse juridische handschriften in beeld I published a few days ago a succinct account of these fragments in German, ‘Utrechter Fragmenten und Urkunden’. At Glossae you can find also an overview of projects and catalogues concerning medieval manuscript and charter fragments.

Some legal fragments

Two parts of fragment Hs. fr. 6.92 reunited – Utrecht UB, Hs fr. 6.92

Legal history is the focus in the second part of this post, but it is necessary to remember other perspectives can be equally interesting and important. I would like to start with Utrecht UB, Hs fr. 6.92, coming from a Van Buchel volume (108 O 12), not just one fragment, but two sets of cuttings, group A with ten larger and one small scrap, and group B with ten cuttings. Of course I started trying to fit the parts of group A together, but this did not work. Combining the two sets was the obvious solution, but actually they still are kept as distinct sets, with a notice on the combinations I worked out for them.

Looking at fitting underlinings and dates proved to be clues to find adjacent parts of the cuttings. Here the data helped me to find the right parts, January 13, 1528. Other parts contain information about a case concerning a house in Cologne, the question of the validity of a mandate, and a letter from the official of the archbishop of Cologne, his ecclestastical judge, to the plebanus of Bonn. Some of the acts in these cuttings have marginal annotations about an act. One of the questions around these cuttings is their nature: Are they part of a kind of trial file or are we looking at a legal consultation (consilium)? As for now I opt for the first interpretation. Apart from two dates in 1527 and 1528 the names of some lawyers appear. At least one of them, Bernhardus de Harderwijck, can be traced in the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum and the Repertorium Germanicum for papal registers at the Romana Repertoria portal (Deutsches Historisches Institut, Rome). He started his studies at Cologne in 1486 and got his doctoral degree in law in 1510, the year he also joined the tribunal of the Reichskammergericht, then at Speyer.

There is a second set with sixteen similar cuttings, Hs. fr. 6.77, from F. oct. 76, another Van Buchel volume. The year 1522 is mentioned in them, and also the word Coloniensis appears within a very similar layout and the same cursive script, which suggests they could belong to the other fragment. However, these sixteen cuttings did not fit together when I tried to repeat my actions with them.

A fragment of a trial document bound with Utrecht 108 N 9

In the volume 108 N 9, also with a Van Buchel provenance, I saw yet another cutting which seems to stem from the document cut into pieces and now kept as fragments 6.92 and 6.77. The handwriting looks very similar, although the interlinear space here is larger. It seems safe to assume at least a datation between 1520 and 1530. It seems logical, too, to locate its origin in the German Lower Rhine region. This fragment mentions a dean and a church without any further indication of a specific location. It would be wonderful to trace yet another fragment still in situ within one of the volumes once owned by Van Buchel or among separately kept fragments, but with possibly three witnesses of the existence of a legal document the harvest is already interesting in itself. One of the immediate challenges facing me is to try to fit pairs of these cuttings into single folia. As for now for each act there are only beginnings, parts representing texts halfway and endings, a tantalizing state of affairs. It is a sobering thought other fragments need to be described first consistently, too, before starting a miniature quest to reconstruct these acts.

A canon law fragment bound with the volume E oct. 122

The third example I want to present here concerns two fragments of a lecture on canon law, bound with the Van Buchel volume E oct. 122. On one side of the fragment with two columns the words per osti. in su., “per Hostiensem in summa”, stand for Hostiensis, the nickname of Henricus de Segusio, cardinal of Ostia (around 1190/1200-1271). The first version of his summa was completed in 1250-1251, which provides us with a terminus post quem for dating this text which seems to be a lecture on the Decretales Gregorii IX. On closer inspection you can read at the top of the right column Spec. in ti., which I read as “Speculum – or Speculator – in titulo”. Guillaume Durand (Durandus) (1231-1296) finished the first version of his Speculum iudiciale around 1271, a second terminus post quem for dating the text and these fragments. Alas both columns of the original page have suffered when cut into pieces, making the number of clues for identification much smaller. The fragment bound at the front in this volume shows an allegation no. Pe. de Ve., a medieval lawyer I have not yet identified.

A story of fragments and history in fragments

Normally a scholar would probably thirst for much more information, daring hypotheses and smashing conclusions. In my view it is wiser to start just getting things right for each fragment. Creating consistent descriptions might seem straightforward, but already the fact fragments and volumes did not arrive at my desk at Special Collections in numerical order should make you pause a moment. I took photos in the order of inspection, and my notes follow the same order. It is a nice job to combine my photos correctly with the normal order of the fragments. By sheer luck I could view side by side as the very first and second Early Modern editions I consulted two volumes with in their bindings corresponding fragments of a charter referring to Hubert van Buchel himself!

In a period with restricted possibilities for research on location I feel lucky and even blessed with all efforts of my colleagues of Utrecht University Library to bring fragments, manuscripts and printed books to the reading room. I am sure I will look back at these months with Special Collections as one of the most extraordinary periods in my scholarly life. I could arrange and photograph objects using as much space as I liked, but working often alone in a reading room was a strange experience. The collection of the reading room with books about book history, manuscripts, palaeography and other relevant subjects was within immediate reach. In a year where so many people were forced to work at home, under sometimes difficult circumstances, I had the privilege of working on location, touching even historical artefacts, the very traces of past periods, sometimes susceptible to quick reconstruction, but more often just sign posts of a larger whole lost to us. Describing charters and fragments is doing fundamental research. For me doing this is among the solaces, the comforting things and rays of light in a period darkened by the pandemic which cut into our world as sharply as the scissors cutting manuscript pages into fragments.

At the very end of this project I saw a number of references to manuscript with fragments turned out to be small and medium-sized archival collections with a number of charters, not just single fragments. It would not do to hastily create descriptions of these charters, even when using Tiele’s descriptions as a starting point. They deserve equal attention as the other charters and fragments I described this year. When I noticed in one case charters and deeds referring to houses near and atthe Janskerkhof square in Utrecht I knew I could complete the circle of this year for my faithful readers! Between 1584 and 1820 the Janskerk was home first to the city library and later to Utrecht University Library. Instead of lamenting unfinished work it is better to look at the things which against all odds did succeed. I am not the only one much more conscious how vulnerable life is, and how many obstacles can hinder the completion of any project now and in the near future. Hopefully the kind of research you dream of or do normally can become (again) reality in 2021.

Finding the right form for medieval formulae

Medieval sources come in a variety of genres. Among sources for medieval legal history the Early Medieval formulae are in a class of its own. The kind of Latin is not as classical as you might like it to be, and the rather old standard edition has now too many defects to be useful. Creating a new edition will be a project requiring besides excellent knowledge of medieval Latin and among much more also stamina and financial support during many years. The Universität Hamburg has got the courage to start the edition project Formulae – Litterae – Chartae led by Philippe Depreux in cooperation with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich. The project is scheduled to run from 2017 to 2031, and thus I look here at it in a relatively early phase.

Legal actions, letters and charters

The title of the project might be the first surprise. Why include also letters and charters when formulae are the core? In the edition of Karl Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi. Accedunt ordines iudiciorum Dei (Hannover, 1882-1886; online, Munich) the formulae have been edited not in the sequence of the manuscripts he used, but in his own order, interspersed with other materials. This way of proceeding is rather remarkable in view of German philological practice in the late nineteenth century, and certainly it stands out among the editions published under the aegis of the MGH.

Formulae were not just formalized legal actions. The project team explains that Early Medieval formulae were a kind of model letters to be used, each with a distinct purpose. The formulae were to be followed as strictly as the formulae of the oldest Romans before standard actions came into existence. They could also serve as models of letters and charters from which you could benefit with some freedom. In my view the mixture of letters and charters is somewhat akin to the mix of both letters and charters in the project Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters discussed here some years ago. Both projects face the challenge of dealing with two different genres, not just in view of their content, but also for editorial policies.

Apart from an introduction to the formulae the project team offers also introductions to letters and charters. Their character as a means not just for private communication, but as elements of public communication is stressed. The transmission of formulae in collections was not straightforward in clear sections with a discernable order. Karl Zeumer and Eugène de Rozière, an earlier editor of formulae in the nineteenth century, were indeed faced with a genre which called for deep reflection and great skills. Zeumer’s edition can be found in a searchable version also at the digital platform dMGH of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. De Rozière (1820-1896) was very young when he published his first edition of formulae, the Formulae Andegavenses publiées d’après le manuscrit de Weingarten actuellement à Fulde (Paris 1844; online, Google (copy Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague)). He was in 1855 one of the founders of the Revue historique de droit français et étranger. In 1869 he published an edition of the Liber Diurnus with formulae used in the papal chancery from the fifth to the eleventh century.

Work in progress

Now you might already sigh that even fifteen years is too short to tackle this complex of three resource genres, but here comes a second surprise: The team at Hamburg gives you online access in their Werkstatt to a reading interface and an editorial interface for the collections. The interface can be viewed in German, English and French. The online laboratory brings you to the beta version for the formulae Andecavenses (from Angers), to an edition for one manuscript (Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, D1), to charters and letters, and also to a bibliography and a list of manuscripts and charters. Amazingly, at least one manuscript is still held in the library of a functioning Benedictine abbey, at Egmond-Binnen in the Dutch province North Holland near Alkmaar. At Leiden are five manuscripts, but most manuscripts can be found in Munich, Paris, Vienna and Vatican City. One of the reasons for writing about formulae is my memory of a workshop about this genre held at Leiden with some of the manuscripts in front of the participants. The list of manuscripts ends with the editions created for formulae from the seventeenth century until the twentieth century, with names as Étienne Baluze and Jean Mabillon among the editors.

Interface with the manuscript Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, D 1, f. 136r (detail)

In the section for charters and letters you can read older editions of these sources. When you look at the manuscript Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, D 1, again the Formulae Andecavenses come into view. Currently the list of manuscripts show only the locations, signatures and editiorial sigla. It would be wonderful to have here also descriptions of these manuscripts and links to digitized versions, qualities giving strength to the projects Bibliotheca Legum: eine Handschriftendatenbank zum weltlichen Recht im Frankenreich and Capitularia: Edition der fränkischen Herrschererlasse, both led by Karl Ubl at the Universität Köln. Information about the manuscript at Fulda is indeed present in the Bibliotheca legum. No doubt relevant manuscripts will eventually become accessible at the editorial interface in Hamburg.

At least two databases elsewhere help you to look at the various collections with formulae. The repertory Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) contains information about the transmission and relevant literature for many relevant collections with formulae. The Heidelberger Hypertextserver has a section on Formelbucher which touches also later periods. Among the Early Medieval formulae in particular the Formulae Marculfi receive attention in Heidelberg.

Surely the project at Hamburg will benefit enormously from the way you can nowadays have digitized versions of manuscripts in front of you on your computer screen, but creating new editions for this century will have to take into account much more than in the old editions the interplay with letters and surviving charters which are now, too, much more easily within our reach thanks to modern editions and digital versions. The differences in transmission of the texts, too, are much more visible. Once upon a time it was seducing to create an edition with the supposed Urtext, but seeing every manuscript, letter or charter as a witness with its own qualities and defects will do more justice to the life and afterlife of these intriguing texts. Some of the manuscripts are quite small. You might want to look at the place of formulae between other texts in a manuscript, too. The project website in Hamburg has a section Fokus der Forschung with recent contributions about many aspects of the Early Medieval formulae. Hopefully the new edition will help to bring the formulae again into view for scholars wanting to investigate in particular the way Late Antiquity evolved into the medieval period. Legal history, the uses of literacy and the interaction between various genres are just a few of the subjects to be enriched from careful and inventive studies of formulae.

Charters, cartularies and rolls

However fragmentary the transmission of medieval sources may be, the sheer number of charters and cartularies is still impressive. Some cartularies saving the text of charters were not made in the usual codex form of manuscripts, but as rolls. This phenomenon is the subject of the French research project ANR Rotulus at the Université de Lorraine and the accompanying blog, also called Rotulus. Looking at material evidence can help you to avoid looking at sources only as texts. In this post I will look at this project, and no doubt there are also examples of such roll cartularies or cartulary rolls outside France. One of the reasons to look at this subject now is an upcoming scholarly event in April.

A different form

The project ANR Rotulus that will run from 2019 to 2021 is an initiative of the Centre de Recherche Universitaire Lorrain d’Histoire (CRULH), based in Nancy and Metz. The project was prompted by the presence of some sixty cartularies in roll format (“cartulaires-rouleaux”) in the French database for cartularies CartulR – Répertoire des cartulaires médievaux et modernes at the Telma platform of the Institut de Recherche d’Histoire des Textes (Paris and Orleans). It was possible to add another sixty cartulary rolls to those already identified. The team of ANR Rotulus has created a very well organized bibliography on the use of rolls in medieval society. Eight years ago I wrote a post about the best known medieval use of rolls, for accounting purposes. In a post about heraldry and legal history I mentioned a number of heraldic rolls.

At the Rotulus blog you can find announcement of scholarly events concerning medieval rolls. On April 3 and 4, 2020 a workshop will be held at Yale University on the theme “L’édition numérique et les manuscrits en rouleaux médiévaux” [The digital edition and manuscripts in roll form]. The workshop will deal with subjects such as the palaeography and cataloging of medieval rolls, and with the transcriptions of manuscripts and critical editions. There will be an introduction into best practices in digital editing, and the use of XML and TEI will come into view. The workshop will be hosted by the group of scholars united around the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the project Digital Rolls and Fragments. At the heart of this workshop will be a devotional roll written in Latin and Middle English, dated between circa 1435 and 1450 (Takamiya MS 56, digital version). Of course you can find more (digitized) rolls and scrolls at the Beinecke. You will forgive me mentioning here English Paleography and Manuscript Culture, 1500–1800 by Kathryn James, curator of Early Modern books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Library, just published by Yale University Press. The website of ANR Rotulus mentions a meeting later this year on the theme Fonctions des cartulaires-rouleaux : approches sociales et contextuelles d’un genre documentaire [Functions of cartulary rolls: social and contextual approaches to a documentary genre], to be held at Metz on November 5-6, 2020.

A recent contribution at the Rotulus blog focuses on a cartulaire-rouleau held at the Bibliothèque Municipale of Angers from the abbey of Notre-Dame du Ronceray. This twelfth-century cartulary consists of six rolls, each of them measuring nearly six meters by 29 centimeters and containing six to eight parchment sheets (MS 844, 845, 846, 847, 848 and 848b). The library at Angers posted a somewhat longer and illustrated version of this post on its own blog. This roll cartulary is duly mentioned in the CartulR database (no. 1383), the material units have each its own description on the level called Exemplaire-tradition where it becomes clear it has the form of a roll (rouleau). The database CartulR has a useful glossary showing among other things the variety of cartularies.

On November 14 and 15, 2019 a conference was held at Angers about the diversity of cartulary rolis. Both the material side of these documents as also their place within diplomatics, the historical auxiliary science for studying charters and related resources, came into view. Among the subjects to discuss was the need for creating a special database with a repertory of cartulary rolls. The second day of this event, held at the Archives départementales de Maine-et-Loire in Angers, ended with a presentation of some roll cartularies in the holdings of this regional archive.

The team of ANR Rotulus very sensibly looks at all forms of medieval rolls in order to understand their uses and development. Why did cartulary rolls come into existence? What role could they have? Who did benefit from this particular form? Is it an exclusively ecclesiastical or monastic format? Half of the cartulary rolls repertoried untll now stems from priories. Rolls from Cistercian monks and from nuns form a distinct minority. Approaches to uses of literacy and gender history, too, will have to be invoked to interpret and understand such facts. Of course I checked CartulR for the presence of cartulary rolls. One example among the 65 results is currently held outside France. The Rijksarchief in Bruges has a roll cartulary for the collegiate chapter of Saint Sauveur in Harelbeke (CartulR, no. 5213). The team of ANR Rotulus has not yet added to CartulR the sixty cartulary rolls which they spotted.

Beyond France

It is only logical to look beyond France for the existence and role of cartulary rolls. CartulR does contain information about some Spanish and Italian cartuiaries, but for these countries no cartulary rolls are mentioned. Recently Stefan G. Holz, Jörg Peltzer and Maree Shirota edited the volume The Roll in England and France in the late Middle Ages (2019; available in open access), a publication included in the bibliography of ANR Rotulus. This volume is part of a book series published for the Sonderforschungsbereich at the university of Heidelberg concerning Materiale Textkulturen. At the blog of this project you can read a post about this volume (Materiale Textkulturen, Band 28) which is a product of the subproject Rollen im Dienst des Königs [Rolls in the king’s service].

Among cartulary rolls outside France those of Margam Abbey held at the National Library of Wales are easily spotted. The Discovery portal of the National Archives in Kew brings you quickly to at least seven examples in various English archives, but not at the National Archives themselves. I was a bit troubled by the fact the Gaunt Roll held at the East Sussex Record Office (GLY 1139) did not show up at first at Discovery in a simple search for cartulary roll. In the Répertoire des cartulaires d’institutions religieuses médiévales sises dans l’espace wallon actuel (Pratiques médiévales de l’écrit, Université de Namur) you can find in its 2017 overview three examples kept in Tournai. It is tempting to add more examples to this post, but I am confident the interest of some of my readers will be kindled enough to find out more about this remarkable resource type.

An addition

At Archivalia Klaus Graf noted I could have mentioned examples of cartulary rolls from Germany. You could indeed start searching at Archivportal-D with terms such as Kopialbuch, Kopiar and Rotul or Rotulus. Searching with the terms Urkunden and Rotul* brings substantial results.

The situation around COVID-19 led to the posponement of the meeting in November 2020. The new date and program is announced by ANR Rotulus in Metz, March 25-26, 2021: Fonctions des cartulaires-rouleaux : approches sociales et contextuelles d’un genre documentaire.

You might want to look at rolls and other forms of reading in roll form in other periods and settings. The online book of Jack Hacknell, Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext (The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2020) contains twelve chapters on very different subjects connected with continuous reading.

A postcript

In November 2022 I was alerted to the online inventory for cartulary rolls in French holdings created by the Rotuli project. In this database you can also serach for relevant literature about this source genre.

The Italian thing: A look at a new palaeography tutorial

How can you embark on studying original manuscripts and archival records or the digital versions of these documents? The number of online tutorials for Italian palaeography is distinctly low in view of the sheer number of digitized resources concerning Italy’s medieval and Early Modern history. The new online tutorial Italian Paleography created by the The Newberry Library in Chicago and the University of Toronto Libraries is most welcome. What are its qualities? How does it stand the comparison with the earlier project of both partners for French Renaissance Paleography? Of course I will also look at the presence of elements directly touching upon legal history.

At the outset

The activity of The Newberry Library in the field of medieval manuscripts and archival records is not a new phenomenon. A number of its departments and centers deal with resources from Europe. There is a concise page about palaeography. The Newberry Library can be proud of its fleet of introductory guides, too. The Digital Newberry brings you to numerous collections and virtual exhibits. The Newberry has created five crowdsourcing and transcribing projects. In their fine Introduction to manuscript studies (Ithaca, NY, 2007) Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham liberally used manuscripts and other documents from the Middle Ages and Renaissance held at The Newberry.

The University of Toronto Libraries can point among their digital collections to no lesser project than the Medici Archive Project. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has digitized a fair number of its manuscripts, to mention just one example, and it has placed a number of its digitized collections in the Internet Archive. The presence in Toronto of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies is a gem for medievalists. I explored a number of scholarly institutions in a post about the international congress of medieval canon law held at Toronto in 2012.

The number of digital collections with archival records from Italy is every bit as high as you might suppose. I counted some thirty projects for Italy on my web page about digital archives. If you want to get an indication of the number of digitized manuscripts in Italy DMMap quickly shows you some thirty collections, excluding those digitized at the Vatican Library with currently well over 18,000 manuscripts. These high figures should make scholars in and outside the Italian peninsula happy, provided you are able to decipher these documents and manuscripts. In earlier posts here I looked for example at the Progetto Irnerio for medieval legal manuscripts in Bologna and at the book series edited by Giovanna Murano about autograph manuscripts of Italian authors. You can use the tag Italy of my blog to find more relevant posts.

One of the reasons there are only few online manuals for Italian palaeography is the presence at several Archivi di Stato and also at the Vatican of a scuola di archivistica, paleografia e diplomatica. Universities do offer courses in palaeography, too. I have found only three free accessible online resources for Italian palaeography, the Materiali didattici per la paleografia Latina created by Antonio Cartelli and Marco Palma (Università degli Studi di Cassino) who deal mainly with medieval manuscripts, and the Lezioni di paleografia of Renata di Simone (Archivio di Stato di Palermo) with an introduction to medieval paleography and book history (PDF), both of them in Italian. There is a tutorial in English for Early Modern and nineteenth-century Italian documents at BYU Script Tutorial. By mistake Spanish is used in the Italian version of this tutorial on the platform created by the Brigham Young University. The thirst for people in the Anglo-American hemisphere to be able to use an introduction in English is understandable. This is a real need, and the new tutorial does tackle this challenge.

The Italian thing

Much what can be said about the website for French Renaissance Paleography applies also to the new tutorial Italian Paleography launched on July 25, 2019. The section with manuscripts leads you to a hundred examples of handwritten books (80 items) and documents (20 items). You can filter them by genre, period, script type, reading difficulty, region and holding institution. This choice of examples seems to have been in favor of manuscripts. For the regions the general localisation “Italy” seems a bit vague. For all other aspects the choice seems quite balanced. 31 items touch the field of politics and government, twelve have been labelled “Law”.

Among the items at Italian Paleography concerning law is a register of criminals executed in Venice, written around 1775 (The Newberry, VAULT Case Ms 6A 34). Its resource type has been indicated as manuscript book, but surely this is not a manuscript in the codicological sense, but an archival document in book form, with bound leaves. The tutorial show only four of the 59 pages. With respect to the type of resource the descriptions have been made in accordance with the Library of Congress’ Thesaurus for Graphic Materials.

Supplication, Milan 1469 – The Newberry, Wing MS folio ZW 1.469 recto (detail)

A document from 1469 is perhaps a better example to show here, a supplication to the lord of Milan to reverse a condemnation.

The address of the supplication, 1469 – The Newberry, Wing MS folio ZW 1 .469 (detail of verso)

This document is of course shown in its entirety. The supplication has been written in a very fluent hand, but the address on the back and the note below it show a less polished handwriting. In fact the main text of the document was written by a writing master. For each item of the tutorial a link is provided to the catalog description, a transcription and a background essay. This is really helpful, and anyone learning to read these documents should learn also not to turn to the transcriptions too soon. I will come back to the detailed description of the script(s) in documents given in each background essay.

The second section of the website is a concise handbook on the development of scripts used in Italy and the rise of the vernacular language. Two much older items have been included among the examples to show the most important points of departure. At the core of this website is not just the study of books and documents from Italy, but also very much the study of books and documents written in the Italian language. The description of the writing hands for the examples is given in Italian. For each phase and script type the relevant examples are listed.

The next section, the appendix, offers you access to a number of digitized calligraphy manuals and historic maps. The resources section leaves little to desire. There is not only a handy overview of the transcriptions and background essays, but also a glossary of palaeographic terms, an overview of relevant dictionaries, a bibliographical section and a section on transcription standards and metadata standards. The sections on abbreviations and symbols, teaching materials and the history of the project do not yet contain information.

I have saved perhaps the best thing for the end. At the start page of Italian Paleography you will find a number of short introductions to palaeography as a subject, its history, some tips and tricks, and also two videos in the right hand menu. In particular the page New to palaeography helps you for quick orientation into Gothic, mercantesca, cancelleresca, humanistic and italic (cursive) script. After creating an account for this website you can make transcriptions at this website using T-PEN (Transcription for Palaeographical and Editorial Notation). Thus this online tutorial offers you also a way to familiarize yourself with this important integrated tool.

Some differences

When you compare Italian Paleography with its older sister French Renaissance Paleography it is understandable some sections have simply not yet been filled. The website for France has a very similar structure. A clear visual difference are the interactive map and the clickable tags for topics and time periods. Reference materials can be found under a separate heading, not as a part of the resources section. The main parts of the website are listed on the start page. The section “About French documents” is empty. The presence of its logo on the start page declares more openly the use of T-PEN. There is a page Get started which in my view helps you initially as good as the videos of Italian Paleography. These differences amount mainly to a judicious remix of elements.

Both websites are hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries. Their logo deserves a place next to that of The Newberry at the top of both online tutorials. At the bottom other institutions are mentioned as well. A number of libraries and institutions in the United States have graciously provided materials for this website. It is fair to conclude after this quick tour that both tutorials fulfill their purpose eminently. The combination of attention to documents with the Italian vernacular and the use of Italian for a very particular part of the descriptions rightly stress also the need to master the Italian language to some degree if you want to study sources in Italian. This linguistic demand combines with the need to be able to read the various kinds of scripts, some of them really challenging, and makes it clear doing history is not just a matter of reading texts translated into your own language and reasoning about them. Thus material and very physical aspects can help teaching you to look beyond the content of a document to its actual form and context. You simply need training for a number of essential activities in doing historical research.

The Italian tutorial shows an agreement from 1466 with an artist about the decoration of a chapel in the Sant’Antonio basilica in Padua. Art historians might be tempted to contemplate the very interesting sketch of the decoration plan in this document, and to forget the legally binding agreement. Legal historians should be seduced to look not only at the agreement itself, but also at the matter at stake and the possibility of putting artistic purposes and procedures into a clear legal framework. It is my sincere wish to the team for Italian Paleography that many students and scholars may benefit from their work. Just like its counterpart for French palaeography the training it offers can greatly assist your research in Italian manuscripts and archival documents. It will save you time and the efforts to learn things only when you arrive in Italy or have found the digitized items you are looking for at your computer screen.

An update

In view of the small number of online tutorials for Italian palaeography it is sensible to mention here the Materiale didattico: Paleografia e diplomatica created by Bianca Fadda, Università di Cagliari, who presents images of several medieval scripts and documents.

A fusion of medieval legal systems at St. Andrews

Some months ago I came across the website of a rather intriguing project which aims at studying not just one medieval legal system, but three. Though the full project title is rather long, Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law | Consonance, Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the web address contains a playful variant of the term “Click me”, and of course I could not resist the temptation to visit the project website. In this post I want to look at this project at the University of St. Andrews and comment on some of its features. In particular the legal “encyclopedia” and the section with text editions can be most useful. Comparative legal history was the very theme of the 24th British Legal History Conference held in St. Andrews from July 10 to 13, 2019.

A tour of a threefold project

The aim of this project is to study three legal systems together in their European setting during the Middle Ages, the common law, the European ius commune and customary law . One of the motivations for this choice is the wish to avoid a picture of common law against European law. Nor does the team want to celebrate the uniqueness of the common law and its development over the centuries or to propagate a new European ius commune. Similarities, changes, continuities and differences are to receive equal attention.

The leader of the CL project is John Hudson, and the senior researcher of this project is Emanuel Conte (Università Roma Tre/EHESS). The four post-doctoral researchers are Andrew Cecchinato, Will Eves, Attilio Stella and Sarah White, and there are three graduate students working on a PhD thesis, Dan Armstrong, David de Concilio and Kim Thao Le. Andrew Cecchinato will focus on the relevance of the European legal heritage for the formation of William Blackstone’s concept of English law. Will Eves will look at the history of concepts for “ownership” in the common law and the influences on it of the concept proprietas in the European ius commune. Attilio Stella is studying the relations between the learned law and judicial and social practice by looking at archival and court evidence from a number of towns in northern Italy. Sarah White is working with twelfth and thirteenth-century treatises on legal procedure, in particular ordines iudiciarii from England, and also on ecclesiastical and Roman legal procedure in general.

The PhD thesis of Dan Armstrong will deal with politics, law and visions of the church in the relations between England and the papacy from around 1066 to around 1154. David de Concilio’s theme is the use of dialectic in legal texts of the late twelfth century, in particular in the brocarda; he plans an edition of a brocarda collection in canon law. Kim Thao Le has started to research the origin and progress of the English jury in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the notion of reputation. She will look for possible interaction between the common law and canon law. The website of the CL project has a section for research updates of individual researchers.

Research, online editions and more

Under the heading Research issues the first issue poses a trenchant question about proprietary law. Who did first coin the phrase “bundle of rights”? John Hudson found the phrase in works from 1886 and 1873. A quick first search for an earlier occurrence led me to Henry Maine who in his Ancient Law: its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas (London 1861, online, Hathi Trust Digital Library) writes in chapter 6 (ed. 1861, p. 178): “The first question leads to the universitas juris; that is, a university (or bundle) of rights and duties”.

However interesting it can be to look here more closely at the individual projects, the presence in itself of a section with online editions of medieval legal texts deserves attention, too. Currently six texts are available online. The first text is a mnemonic poem for remembering the causae and quaestiones of the Decretum Gratiani, edited by Attilio Stella. The next item is a transcription of a mid-thirteenth century procedural treatise, ‘Iudicium est actus trium personarum’. Sarah White explains three different treatises exist with the same incipit. The third page presents a digitized version of the edition by Karl Lehmann, Das langobardische Lehnrecht (Göttingen 1896) of the Vulgata version of the Libri Feudorum, a treatise on feudal law eventually part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. The team of the CL project promises us an English translation of this text, following perhaps the lead of Jop Spruit and Jeroen Chorus who published in 2016 a Dutch translation of the Libri Feudorum as an addendum to the translation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, discussed here earlier in a post on translations of medieval legal texts.

With the fourth item customary law comes into view. It brings a transcription of the first part of the text known as the Très ancien coutumier de Normandie or Statuta et consuetudines Normanniae transcribed from the manuscript Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Ottobon. 2964. In my 2011 post ‘Centuries of law in Normandy’ I devoted some space to this coutumier. The fifth text is a transcription of the Summa feudorum ascribed to Johannes de Revigny, a lawyer from Orleans. The introduction discuss the scholarship since the fifties on the identification of the author. Using the term “Pseudo-Revigny” is a most convenient suggestion of the CL team for the author of this text which survives only in the manuscript Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, ms. Parm. 1227. The sixth text presented here is a ‘Summula de presumptionibus’, transcribed from the manuscript BAV, Pal. lat. 653. This text represents the brocarda genre, and it is safe to assume David de Concilio provided its transcription and a useful introduction.

Another and much promising part of the CL project is a legal encyclopaedia. There will be three levels within this project. Level 1, already available, offers a dictionary with concise definition of legal terms in common law and both Roman and canon law in their medieval stage. This dictionary is most welcome, and in particular helpful for scholars who want support on unfamiliar grounds. On level 2 a number of terms will be discussed more thoroughly. On the third level conversations will be published around a limited number of terms which seem the most rewarding in discussing aspects of medieval law. Any suggestions, corrections and additions can be sent to the CL team by mail, clclcl@st-andrews.ac.uk.

It is only natural to find on the project website an overview of recent publications concerning the research done for the CL project. The Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research (ILCR) at the University of St. Andrews provides the framework and foundation for the CL project. I could not help looking at particular at the project for Canterbury Court Records. Sarah White has developed a databases with images from the thirteenth-century records held at the Canterbury Cathedral Archives. The direct link to the database leads you to a special St. Andrews login page for which the CL team can help you to register. I found some solace in the image collections of Canterbury Cathedral with a great selection of archival records and manuscripts. One would dearly like to look at these court records, because after all the CL project wets your appetite to search yourself for possible interactions between the common law, customary law and medieval canon law. Having online access to court records at Canterbury will cast a wider net for comparison with court records from the diocese of Ely and the archdiocese York. This comment should not stop you from visiting the website of the ILCR with its interesting projects, including a number of videos.

The team of the CL project has started working on a number of coherent themes that perhaps too often are seen in isolation. The results can be become a mirror in which the interplay between seemingly different legal systems and the ways medieval lawyers worked can be become much clearer. Some rhetoric about the uniqueness English law and the unity of European law will probably not been blown away by it, but for those wanting to look beyond the surface some promising vistas will become visible.

Medieval manuscripts from France and England united

The future of the relations between Europe and the United Kingdom can at times seem darkened by current politics. As if no Brexit of whatever nature lies ahead a new online project has been created giving online access to some 800 medieval manuscripts kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the British Library in London. These manuscripts were produced between 700 and 1200. At least a number of them belongs to the period the dukes of Normandy had conquered England and established connections that would last for centuries. In this post I want to look at the project France-Angleterre 700-1200: Manuscrits médiévaux entre 700 et 1200, and in particular at the manuscripts connected with law and justice. You can view the project in French, English and Italian.

Manuscripts in two cities

The two libraries cooperating in this project would sorely miss the support of a Dritter im Bunde, The Polonsky Foundation, which supports projects concerning cultural heritage. Medieval manuscripts receive a fair share of its attention, in particular for the digitization of manuscripts held at the Vatican Library in cooperation with the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. The France-Angleterre website is supported by a website hosted by the British Library, Medieval England and France, 700-1200, viewable in English and French, where you will find articles on subjects such as medieval historians, manuscript illumination and the libraries of medieval monasteries. For both the BL and the BnF the website offers an introduction about the history of their manuscript collections and a selection of 115 manuscripts. The selection contains two decorated manuscripts of the Decretum Gratiani (BnF, Latin 3888 and BL, Arundel 490), a copy of Justinian’s Digest (BnF, Latin 4454) and a volume with legal texts concerning London, a description of England and Ranulph de Glanville’s legal treatise (BL, Add 14252). You can read also about six themes: art and illumination, history and learning, science and nature, Christian religion and belief, manuscript production and the modern care of medieval manuscripts in library collections. There is a glossary and a series of videos about the making of medieval manuscripts. You can also watch a video touching on legal history, The role of law in governing medieval England. At the resources page the blogs of the BL and BnF can tell you more about the project. Several conferences about these newly digitized manuscripts will be held, too.

The main manuscripts website of France-Angleterre offers four filters to approach the digitized manuscripts: themes, authors, locations and centuries. I assume here you would like to explore a particular theme, canon and civil law; nine other themes are presented as well. With 70 manuscripts of the 800 on this website the score for legal texts is higher here than in the selection, just four among 115 manuscripts, but this is better than the other way around. The presentation of the manuscripts at France-Angleterre looks familiar for regular visitors of the Gallica digital library of the BnF. When you look at the languages of these seventy manuscripts the number of 69 for Latin clearly means some manuscripts contain texts in two languages. The range of dates is from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, with 24 manuscripts from the twelfth century. The presence of BL, Royal MS 8 E XV with Alcuin’s letters is justified by the presence of fragments of a tenth-century charter. Each manuscript is not shown in the viewer used at Gallica, but in the IIIF compliant viewer increasingly used nowadays. With the heading Canon and civil law you would expect a filter to distinguish between legal systems, but this is not provided for. For canon law I mentioned already the Decretum Gratiani, and you will find a number of older canon law collections, such as the Collectio Dacheriana (BL, Harley 2886 and 3845) and the Dionysio-Hadriana, the Rule of St. Benedict, the Pseudo-Isidorean decretals, and also the Institutio canonicorum Aquisgranensis, the Aachen rule for canons. The detailed description of BnF Latin 13908 mentions another text in this volume, the Statuta Adalhardi abbatis, the reason why this manuscript with Boethius’ De institutione musica has been included in this section. The Statuta Adalhardi abbatis are a variant title for the Constitutiones Corbeienses or Statuta seu Brevia Adalhardi abbatis Corbeiensis from 826, information easily found at the Monastic Manuscript Project. This manuscript is the oldest one to contain this text.

The Collectio Francofurtana – BL, Egerton 2901, f. 1r – image British Library

My interest was in particular awakened by the presence of the Collectio Francofurtana in BL, Egerton 2901, a twelfth-century collection of papal decretals, verdicts in the form of letters to delegated judges. During my period in Munich in 1997 and 1998 at the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute of Medieval Canon Law I had the chance to look at Walther Holtzmann’s card index of twelfth-century decretals, and also at the microfilms of the four manuscripts of the Collectio Francofurtana, an early systematic decretal collections created in or around 1183. Gisela Drossbach has successfully dealt with both the card index, now available online, and this decretal collection. Twenty years later it is only natural to look for the online presence of the other three manuscripts as well. Within the Digitale Sammlungen of the Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main you will indeed find the manuscript Barth. 60, the manuscript which gave its name to this decretal collection. The manuscript BnF, Lat. 3922A is present in Gallica, and the manuscript Troyes, BM 961, has been digitized in the Mediathèque of the Bibliothèque municipale in Troyes. It is quite a change from the black-and-white microfilms to four manuscripts at your screen in full colour.

Among the texts concerning canon law at France-Angleterre you will find texts from several church councils and also monastic regulations, in particular the Coutumes de Cluny (Constitutiones Cluniacenses) in BnF, Lat. 13875. The Decretum of Burchard of Worms is present in BnF, Lat. 3860.

For Roman law we encounter not only the Digesta but also the Codex Iustinianus, the Codex Theodosianus and the Epitome Gaii Institutionum, a shortened version of the Institutes of Gaius. A number of Late Antique legal texts collectively known as the leges barbarorum or the Volksrechte are also present, among them the Leges Visigothorum and the Breviarium Alarici, the Lex Salica and the Lex Ribuaria. These texts are found in manuscripts surrounded by other texts. The French and Italian version of the website specifically mentions this fact for the section on law, “mais aussi tout recueil de lois” and “così come ogni altro compendio di natura giuridica”, but this has been omitted in the English version.

The language filter of France-Angleterre invites you to explore the use of other languages than Latin. For the first manuscript with one or more texts in Old French, BL, Cotton Tiberius E IV, it is not immediately clear which text is written in Old French. The manuscript catalogue of the British Library makes clear two only two separate texts at f. 28v and 29v were written in Old French, one of them the abdication of John, king of Scots on July 10, 1296. The same story can be told for BL, Cotton Vespasian B XX, with only some notes in Old French at f. 25r. I was afraid this story would continue for the three manuscripts with texts in Anglo-Norman, for example BL, Add. 24006 with as its main text the Tractatus de legibus et consuetudines Angliae by Ranulph of Glanvill and the first version of the Leges Edwardi Confessoris. The entry for the Early English Laws project does not mention any Anglo-Norman text in this manuscript. However, BL Add 14252 with again Glanvill’s treatise does contain several legal texts in Anglo-Norman, among them laws for London (f. 101-104r, 113r-117r, 119r-124r), and for weavers and fullers in Winchester, Oxford and other towns (f. 111r-112r). In BL, Sloane 1580 the text in Anglo-Norman is not a legal text, but the oldest translation in medieval vernacular of a scientific text, the Comput (Computus) by Philippe de Thaon (f. 162v-178r). The manuscript contains only one legal treatise (f. 182r-184r), a kind of prologue connected with the Epitome exactis regibus. BL, Cotton Otho E XIII, has glosses in Breton for the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis. The Comput of Philippe de Thaon can be read in four other manuscripts within France-Angleterre.

A rapid tour

With just seventy manuscripts out of a total of 800 for France-Angleterre it is clear the sample taken here deals with less than ten percent of this digital collection. The impression seems clear that the selection contains for the field of law mainly Roman law texts, Late Antique laws, a wide choice of texts touching on canon law, and only a few examples of texts concerning English law. I did not readily find any text on French customary law or French royal acts. Before you might divine this has to do with the division of manuscripts in this selection, I should add that this selection contains thirty-five manuscripts from each library, a perfectly balanced choice with regard to numeric values. The choice for the period 700-1200 could have led to the presence of multiple texts in Anglo-Saxon in this selection, but in fact there is just a single manuscript in this language, the Heliand in BL, Cotton Caligula A VII. The advanced search mode of France-Angleterre allows you to search for several basic fields, for particular languages and time ranges.

I found it very important to see at France-Angleterre how texts we tend to single out were transmitted alongside sometimes very different other texts. It reminded me we should not see medieval law and justice in isolation. For all its qualities the IIIF viewer does not immediately show you how to go quickly to the end of a manuscript, but the gallery view does this for you. In a number of cases there is a side panel at the left which helps you to navigate to particular sections of a manuscript. The detailed description of items is often sufficient, but anyway all items are connected either with the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the British Library or with the catalogue for archives et manuscrits of the BnF. This joint venture supported by The Polonsky Foundation affirms the reputation of both libraries. France-Angleterre seems to me a great gateway for exploring medieval manuscripts, both for beginners and for scholars with their own questions and wishes.

A postcript

Klaus Graf, archivist of the RWTH (Aachen), has checked on Archivalia at random some of the links to manuscripts at France-Angleterre, and he found serious problems. Graf fights for the durability of links, in particular permalinks . It is only reasonable to create a reliable website which can function correctly for many years. Link rot is not a new phenomenon. It would be bad to have weak links right from the start. The team of France-Angleterre should deal quickly and constructively with this matter.

At the introductory website of France-Angleterre hosted by the British Library Joanna Fronska has published an article on legal manuscripts in England and France with much attention to manuscript production and artistic influences.

Syria’s cultural heritage online, a case for open access

From October 22 to 28 the yearly Open Access Week will be held. Around the world there are initiatives to create open access in various forms. Institutions can choose for degrees of openness for their digital collections. The debate about open access to major scholarly journals is very important for the future of science and its presence in society. In some cases open access is most helpful in tracing, monitoring and preserving cultural heritage. For Syria this is even absolutely vital. In this post I would like to look at some projects aiming to preserve Syria’s cultural heritage. The war in Syria has taken the lives of too many people. Invaluable objects from its long history have been destroyed, and the same fate threatens today.

Syria’s cultural heritage

The UNESCO has created the Observatory of Syrian Cultural Heritage. Its name sounds like The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. This UNESCO observatory looks at buildings, movable heritage and intangible heritage, and it launches initiatives for their protection. You can find also information about the actions of UNESCO partners such as ICOM. The ICOM is home to the Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods and the Intangible Cultural Heritage & Museums Project, and ICOM has created other portals as well. ICOM works together with The Blue Shield, an organization which helps the coordination for saving and protecting cultural heritage in emergency situations. The UNESCO lists also other initiatives which aim specifically at Syria, some of the well-known, for example The Aleppo Project and the Damascus History Foundation. I could not help noticing Scanning for Syria, an international project led by Leiden University for scanning archaeological objects at Tell Sabi Abyad in the field and creating virtual reconstructions. You can find publications resulting from the excavations in open access in the Leiden University scholarly repository.

An important resource for finding such initiatives for Syria is the Syriac Reference Portal, but today I could not reach this website. Luckily I bookmarked a number of websites. The Syrian Heritage Archive Project has been created by the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Some of the results can be seen in the iDAi Gazetteer, an interactive map system which is connected with other georeferenced resources. The information for objects in Syria can be approached in several ways, in particular using iDAI objects.

The Open Access Week mentions at its website many groups and events, but the very word Syria is sadly missing. It makes me more eager to proceed here to initiatives which offer more substantial contributions for Syria. Syri-Ac is a portal to resources for the Syrian language, literature and culture. There is a generous links section and a scholarly bibliography. Among the valuable sections the overview of digitized Syriac manuscripts stands out. You can use a sortable or a faceted version. The sortable version shows concise descriptions of the contents, and you can perform keyword searches. The faceted version allows you to filter quickly for languages, holding institutions, authors and genres.

The E-ktobe: manuscrits syriaques catalogue created at the IRHT/CNRS (Paris-Orleans) gives currently detailed descriptions of a restricted number of Syriac manuscripts. No doubt this resource will grow in strength. One of the largest online collections with Syriac manuscripts with manuscripts actually held in Syria is presented in the Virtual Hill Monastic Museum and Library, better known under its acronym vHMML. You can view manuscripts after registration. No registration is needed for the palaeographical introduction to Syriac scripts in the online School of the HMML. A perhaps unexpected number of digitized manuscripts and fragments containing items in Syriac can be found at the portal of the International Dunhuang Project, but thanks to Syri-Ac you are alerted to nearly 650 fragments. The Dunhuang project deals mainly with Tibetan texts and manuscripts found in the Chinese town Dunhuang.

Epigraphy is a scholarly field with a tradition for researching a part of Syria’s cultural heritage. Searchable Greek Inscriptions has an overview of online resources for Greater Syria and the East. In particular but not exclusively Palmyra is mentioned among the resources. The Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice has created The Ebla Digital Archives for royal inscriptions from the third millennium BCE found in Ebla/Tell Mardikh. The closeness of Syria to ancient and modern empires comes into view at the Hethitologie Portal Mainz which deals with cuneiform inscriptions found in modern Turkey and northern Syria. The Khalili Research Centre of Oxford University is responsible for OCIANA, the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient Northern Arabia, an area which covered at least a part of southern Syria.

One of the general resources for Latin inscriptions is the Photographic Database within the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg. You can also search for images of inscriptions at the EAGLE portal. With the EAGLE mobile app you can take photos of inscriptions in situ and compare them with the database.

Finding more

This post could be much longer, but maybe it is important to realize projects can easily be overlooked. Initiatives do not come from just one country. Some countries have institutes in the Middle East which watch developments in Syria carefully, others follow the Middle East since decades both on location and from the outside. The American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Alexandria, Virginia, has created the platform ASOR-Syrian Heritage with reports on damage inflicted to cultural heritage. The ASOR has a digital archive for its rich history in archaeological excavations. The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has an extensive digital collection with photographs from the library of the American Geographical Society and also the Wisconsin Palmyrean Aramaic Inscription Project. Damage to archaeological sites in Syria is discussed in particular by the Association for the Protection of Syrian Archaeology. Monuments of Syria preserves literally images of the situation in 2011 and gives links to a number of resources. These are just a few of the websites you, too, can find using the ever-active Ancient World Online blog maintained by Charles Jones. Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources is an online journal which helps you to find just what it promises

Just as we cannot take open access as granted, we cannot afford to think every project concerning Syria can be traced easily. Online maps such as the one concerning the civil war in Syria or a similar map at Edmaps are ready at hand, but you need to search for other resources. It is a lucky situation the results of research in the filed of Classical Antiquity can almost always be found in open access. In Europe many people can benefit from an autumn holiday week. For those who like to sit behind a computer screen or surf with a tablet there is every chance to discover next week lots of resources in open access about a country which goes through a dark period in its long history. For me it would suffice if this post invites you to find out more yourself.

The Hafliðaskrá, a legendary law

This summer a very special commemoration will take place in Iceland. 900 years ago the first Icelandic laws, the Hafliðaskrá, came into existence. At the seventeenth International Saga Conference to be held at Reykjavik and Reykholt on August 12-17, 2018, the jubilee made it even into the title, Íslendinga sǫgur / 900 years Grágás Laws. What are the Gragas? What do we know about their relationship to this law? How does they relate to Icelandic sagas? I will try to provide an introduction to these laws and some answers to these questions. In two earlier posts Scandinavian laws came here already into view. The first post offered a general overview, and the second post looks at modern translations of Nordic laws.

Laws and literature

Medieval Iceland is famous for its sagas, legendary tales about Iceland’s medieval society with grisly stories, strong men and strange encounters. Icelandic is a language with roots in Old Norse. Approaching the sagas and the Edda, the most famous collection of sagas, is complicated by the existence of two versions, one in prose, the other in poetry.

Let’s first look at the Hafliðaskrá. If you would look in the Wikipedia in its various versions you will find only articles about this law in Icelandic, Swedish and Spanish. The lemma in the Icelandic Wikipedia is very short, the Swedish tells us more, and the Spanish points even to scholarly literature. The Hafliðaskrá is a set of laws proposed in the Althing, the Icelandic parliament, by Hafliði Másson and Bergþór Hrafnsson, a lögsögumaður, literally a law man, knowledgable about the law, a term not so far from the Latin iurisperitus. The Hafliðaskrá is also called the Bergþórslög. For the first time in Iceland’s history laws were written down. The great paradox of the Hafliðaskrá is that there is no manuscript witness to its text. We know about it thanks to a saga. It is therefore unclear to which extent any laws issued in 1118 in the Hafliðaskrá are part of the Grágás law collection published around 1200.

For the Grágás 55 manuscripts are listed at the Icelandic manuscript portal Handrit, accessible in Icelandic, Swedish and English. There is an entry for the Grágás in the English Wikipedia. By the way, this is the point to mention the online version of the Íslensk-ensk orðabók (Concise Icelandic-English Dictionary), online in the Icelandic digital collection of the University of Wisconsin. The etymology of the word Grágás is curious. Either they are literally the Grey Goose Laws, or they were supposed to have been written with goose quills. The bibliography by Halldór Hermannsson, The Ancient Laws of Norway and Iceland. A Bibliography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1911; Islandica, 4) has been digitized and can quickly be accessed as part of Cornell University’s Islandica: A Series in Icelandic Studies where the latest monographs in the Islandica series published since 2008 can be read online, too.

The Grágás in the Konungsbok – Reykjavik, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, GKS 1157 fol., f. 84r – source: Handbok i norrøn filologi,
https://folk.uib.no/hnooh/handbok/index.html

Scholars view two manuscripts as the main textual witnesses of the Grágás, the Konungsbók [GKS 1157 fol., since 1979 in the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, Reykjavik; written 1240-1260] and the Staðarhólsbók [Reykjavik, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, AM 334 Fol., written 1260-1281], both accessible online at Handrit, the digital library of Icelandic manuscripts, The Konungsbók manuscript was held for a long period at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, hence its Latin designation Codex Regius. The Grágás were edited by Vilhjálmur Finsen, first from the Konungsbók, published as Grágás: Islændernes lovbog i fristatens tid (…) in four volumes between 1852 and 1870. Finsen added a Danish translation. The first volume of his edition is online at Baekur, the central Icelandic digital library, but you can find all four volumes in the Internet Archive. In 1879 Finsen’s edition of the Grágás in the Staðarhólsbók appeared. Peter Foote, Andrew Dennis and Richard Perkins translated the Grágás into English [Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás (2 vols., Winnipeg 1980-2006)]. You can read the text of the Grágás in Finsen’s edition (vol. 1) also online at the Icelandic Wikisource. Another online version of the first volume of Finsen’s edition is in fact a reprint [Grágás. Konungsbók (Odense 1974)] which mentions other translations, in Latin, Hin forna lögbók Íslendínga sem nefnist Grágás. Codex juris Islandorum antiquissimus qui nominatur Grágás, Johan Frederik Vilhelm Schlegel (ed. and transl.) (Hafniae 1832) and in German, Islandisches Recht. Die Graugans, Andreas Heusler (transl.) (Weimar 1937), published in the series Germanenrechte of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht, an institution created in 1933 to support ideas of the Nazi regime about law and order in the Third Reich. J.F.W. Schlegel (1765-1836) was a Danish nephew of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. Heusler (1865-1940) was a Swiss medievalist and a specialist of Germanic and Scandinavian languages literature. Earlier he published for example a study on criminal law in the sagas, Das Strafrecht der Isländersagas (Leipzig 1911; online, Internet Archive).

German scholars have continued to study the language of the Grágas in great detail, leading to studies like such as Wortschatz der altisländischen Grágás (Konungsbók) by Heinrich Beck (Göttingen 1993). More recently appeared the monograph by Hans Henning Hoff, Hafliði Másson und die Einflüsse des römischen Rechts in der Grágás (Berlin 2012) who studies the person of Hafliði Másson and looks at the influence of Roman law and Christianity on laws in medieval Iceland. He also gives an overview of early Icelandic laws and their manuscript transmission.

While reading about the Grágás it becomes clear this name has been used only since the sixteenth-century. It must be remembered, too, that Iceland lost its independence in the years 1262-1264 to Norway. There is a very substantial distance in time between the surviving manuscripts and their redaction in their rather loose form transmitted over the centuries. Only a few leaves from the twelfth century with laws known later from the Grágás have survived [AM 315 d fol, dated 1150-1175]. Alas they are only partially readable at the surface without special light and other modern tools. At Handritin heima, a website in Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and German, you will find palaeographical and codicological guidance to medieval Icelandic manuscripts. We must remember in particular the efforts of Árni Magnússon (1668-1730) to save Icelandic manuscripts and books, but in 1728 a fire in Copenhagen destroyed many printed books and luckily only a smaller number of manuscripts in his house. Lost forever were thus early versions of famous texts such as the Heimskringla. For the prose version of the Edda the Codex Traiectinus, a manuscript written on paper around 1600 and held at Utrecht since 1643 (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, ms. 1374; digital version, Special Collections UB Utrecht) is one of only four more or less complete surviving manuscripts.

The Stofnún Arna Magnússonar (SAM) in Reykjavik honours Magnusson’s heritage and scholarly work and promotes research in the field of Iceland’s cultural history. The institute hosts a number of projects and databases. Six language projects are presented at the Malid portal. The SAM has also created the Íslenskt textasafn, an Icelandic textual corpus, and the ISLEX Orðabókin, a multilingual online dictionary for the various Scandinavian languages. One of the projects awaiting completion is an online catalog of Icelandic manuscripts in Canada and the United States.

The University of Copenhagen has become the home of the Den Arnamagnæanske Kommission, a commission founded in 1772 to govern the Arnamagnæanske Stiftelse, the foundation that safeguarded Magnusson’s manuscripts, books and papers. You can read online at Baekur the 1889 catalogue of the 3,000 manuscripts of which 1,400 remain in Copenhagen. The Danish institute has created a separate website about medieval Nordic manuscripts and the online Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog, a dictionary for Old Norse and Icelandic prose. The project for The Medieval Nordic Legal Dictionary has so far resulted in a series of translations and studies, and an indispensable bibliography which you can download. Creating the dictionary will be a work for many years. At Septentrionalia you can find a PDF version of Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen’s Grundwörterschatz Altisländisch (1999).

There is a clear tradition of studying Icelandic law in connection with Icelandic literature. This tradition is at work, too, in the choice of themes in the section around the Grágás of the conference in August 2018. Among the themes are the contrast between oral and written culture, the history of legal and administrative institutions, ecclesiastical versus secular law, and of course law and legal culture in the Icelandic sagas. The role of legal knowledge in politics and the historiography of medieval law and legal culture, too, will come into view. One of the things shown here at several points is the need to look at resources in neighbouring Scandinavian countries when you are studying one of them., but of course it is wonderful to go to all these Icelandic digital resources with their short names! While writing the last paragraphs of this post the weather in my country was rather hot. Hopefully it did not lead me to serious errors or omissions. Comments and additional information are always welcome, and to many posts I have added postscripts. Let’s hope the weather and volcanoes on Iceland will not disturb the conference in August.