Letters, postal services and law in Early Modern Europe

Several scholarly projects have created online access, in repertories or digital versions, to Early Modern letters, in particular for a number of famous writers and scholars. Less attention seems to go to mail delivery in Early Modern Europe. Lately I encountered the research blog of Eric Vanzieleghem (Brussels) who charts French legislation on postal services from the fourteenth century onwards, focusing in particular on postal services during the Enlightenment. By chance I also spotted the website of a research project about Early Modern itineraries and travel guide books aiming at gaining more insight into networks connecting European towns and people. In my view it is fruitful to look at both projects together in a single contribution. A book with images and transcriptions of Dutch letters from many centuries gave me the final push to start this post.

You’ve got mail

Choosing correspondences as a subject goes clearly against the trend of the hyperquick social media and the continuous instant arrival of bits of information at our computers and mobile phones. Letters with their sheer length, the impatience of waiting for the postman to arrive, and the sense of expectation when opening a closed envelope have become rare. To be honest, I like to delve into Early Modern letters, but as a legal historian I hesitated to express this interest! Physical post might be less important now, but we all want to be kept posted on developments, and bloggers keep posting their contributions.

A look at the blog directory of the Hypotheses blog network earlier this year brought me to the blog Histoire du courrier dans l’Europe des Lumières created by Eric Vanzieleghem. Research concerning the letters of Condorcet led him in 2022 to start investigating legislation about postal services in Early Modern France. Vanzieleghem rightly started with defining the main concepts concerning post and postal services, and before I knew it he had me hooked in. The French word courrier was first used to refer to the actual carrier of letters, while nowadays it means the entirety of packages, written and printed matters send by post. The word poste literally stems from the stations where one could change horses. It referred to the distance between them and the network of these posts. Only since the nineteenth century its meaning changed into the desigination of state or private postal services. Vanzieleghem promises us an arricle about the eighteenth-century ferme générale des postes, and this office brings us close to the French government and administration during the Ancien Régime.

Until now Eric Vanzieleghem has published only six posts. One of them gives you the text of a royal ordinance from 1673 which adjusted postal regulations after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1673). I found in particular the tariff for postal service in force between 1703 and 1759 very interesting. It deals both with French regions and with a number of European postal routes. The payments due for a trajectory changed markedly when passing through particular towns. Part of the reasons behind these differences stem clearly form the very itinerary you letter had to go. In the second section of this post itineraries and travel guides will come into view.

Vanzieleghem gives us a list of the eighteenth-century correspondences used for his research. Both online versions of well-known corresponces fiugure here, buyt alo some very recently edited letters of more unfamiliar persons. He alerts to the recent discovery at the National Archives, Kew, of 75 letters written in 1757 and 1758 captured from the French navy.

His page on legislation is of course a key element for my posts. Van Zieleghem righly looks far and wide to find royal ordinances from 1315 onwards and revolutionary legislation upto 1801. The famous Receuil général des anciennes lois françaises (…) edited by François-André Isambert and others (29 vol., Paris, 1821-1833) does not contain every relevant ordinance until 1789. The Receuil d’Isambert is available online among the digitized legislative resources in the section Essentiels du droit of Gallica. The chronological list does not (yet) contain references for every ordinance in it, let alone links to digitized editions, but there is a brief overview of the main resources used sofar. It seems Vanzieleghem has found a lot of revolutionary decrees and laws, but he does not refer to the online Décrets et Lois 1789-1795: Collection Baudouin and La loi de la Révolution Française 1789-1799 on which you find information here in a post I wrote in 2022.

At the page Références of his blog Vanzieleghem offers a bibliography with several sections. Apart from scholarly literature for France he mentions a few titles for Italy and Switzerland. He also includes a list with a number of Early Modern books about letters and postal services, some of them with links to digitized versions. Vanzieleghem has either made a very strict selection of works or he has not (yet) used the online Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française (Université de Lorraine, Nacy-Metz), searchable in French and English. For the maritime postal services he has found more titles than currently present in this online bibliography.

Early Modern itineraries and digital humanities

The research project Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigit) is led by Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech). Her project team aims at mapping itineraries in Early Modern travel guide books on maps, using these data to build a project in the field of spatial history. Midura explains the aim of EmDigit using as an example a rare early Italian edition, Poste diverse d’Italia, Alemagna, Spagna, e Francia (Milan, [1550]). This edition is not recorded in EDIT16 and the Universal Short Title Catalogue; the union catalogue of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale does not mention any copy of it in Italy. The only known copy has been digitized in full color by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, however, with currently as inferred date of publication around 1620. This change of seventy years came possibly after comparison with a copy of the edition Milan 1647 held at the library of Munich University, but more probably in view of the activity in and around 1622 of the Milanese printer Nava as shown in the Heritage of the Printed Book Database. The HPB database currently repeats the date around 1550 for the book Midura presents at EmDigit. I will look here at other elements and arguments for datation of this rare book.

Title page of the Poste diverse d’Italia – copy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Rar. 1075 – image source: BSB

The book gives the distances between cities, adverts you about the differences in length of the mile in countries, and contains detailed information about the dates of European year markets, a concise pilgrim’s guide for the Holy Land, and the dates of the weekly departure and delivery of mail for particular itineraries. Midura plotted the resulting data on a map of Europe. As for internal evidence for the date of production of this work, on pages 15 and 26 it is stated Vienna is the current residence of the imperial court, which suggests 1529 as a terminus post quem or the period after 1620. Maybe Midura has been misled by the black-and-white version available online in Google Books with the old datation 1550 given in 2014. It seems she simply did not check the bibliographical information at its ultimate source. Luckily Midura provides at GitHub a PDF with a very substantial list of printed itinerary books between 1545 and 1747. This list provides you with a basis to add further works, for example more translations of some of the works mentioned. Midura points to two editions of a Dutch translation of Georg Kranitz’ Delitiae Italiae. Works in Dutch can be traced using the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), now online at the CERL platform.

Midura noted on January 1, 2024 in the ReadMe document and the GitHub startpage of EmDigit the problem with the datation of the Poste diverse edition; she opts for a datation around 1700. She does not mention the new date around 1620 proposed by the librarians in Munich, and she points to just a single other digitized itinerary held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. An online search in the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog – with a search interface in German and English – will quickly bring you to more relevant digitized works held at this library and elsewhere.

The bibliography by Madura shows very clearly some titles took over advertising claims from other books, and perhaps even more for their contents. The GitHub page of Midura for EmDigit gives you access to the various digital components of the map with the postal routes. The spatial dimensions of the post routes in Early Modern Europe are certainly clear, but their presence in any particular short period needs further elaboration and some basic work, starting with using more printed itineraries and widening also the list of secondary scholarly literature. Midura tells you more about her project in the article ‘Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545–1700’, Journal of Social History 54/4 (2021) 1023–1063. Midura was also involved in developing a transcribing model for Transkribus, Italian administrative hands 1550-1770. In a period of 150 years Europe changed drastically, if only becaure of long wars, and thus it is vital to locate information both in space and time. Midura uses some eighty itineraries for her project.

The EmDigit team organizes in 2024 several workshops. Midura announces on X (Twitter) she is going to publish her study The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe in open access. I was particular happy to see her announcement, because it can form a bridge to the third and last section of this post around a book on letters from the Netherlands.

Post Scriptum

Letter writing comes in various forms and genres. Recently I was delighted to pick up a copy of a book by Jet Steinz, P.S. Van liefdespost tot hatemail. De 150 opmerkelijkste Nederlandse brieven [P.S. From love letters to hate mail. The 150 most remarkable Dutch letters] (Amsterdam 2019). Steinz found a great way to organize her book and to give it more impact. She organized the letters by genre in chronological order, and she presents each letter with images of the original in full color and a transcription. For older letters she sometimes rephrased the wording for smooth reading in modern Dutch. Letters in foreign languages have been translated. Only the relatively small format (18 by 23 cm) prevents it from truly becoming a kind of palaeographical atlas for late medieval to modern scripts. Apart from letters from famous Dutch people, be they Erasmus, Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek, Rembrandt van Rijn, the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, Anne Frank or Johan Cruyff, numerous letters stem from ordinary people. Letters by famous Dutch writers, often written when they were not yet famous, appear in many genres, even in the section for children’s letters.

With 34 genres Steinz created a wonderful array of moods and aims in letters, bringing emotions from love to hate, anger to happiness, obedience and protest into relief. Sea post, not unfamiliar here from the posts I wrote here about the letters among the Prize Papers in the collection of the High Court of Admiralty held at the National Archives, Kew, figures as the first genre. Letters by prisoneers and letters with threats, letters applying for a job and rejections by firms, letters from scholars and simple notes about household chores show many sides of human life. Steinz brings together letters from many Dutch cultural institutions. She dispensed with exact references to archival collections, thus making it into a nice exercise to trace these meta-data. Steinz redeems this omission with a substantial bibliography of relevant literature about Dutch letters.

Apart from letters captured by enemy navies Steinz used another curious collection of letters which never reached their destiny. Simon de Brienne, a seventeenth-century Dutch postmaster, retained some 2600 undeliverable letters in a chest. After nearly a century in the former Communication Museum, The Hague, these letters and the entire museum collection will move in September 2024 to the main location of Beeld en Geluid [Sound and Vision] in Hilversum, the Dutch national audiovisual museum. The chest and letters were the subject of the independent Brienne research project, now itself part of the international Letterlocking project for creating a typology of ways of sealing letters, and for tracing and reading unopened letters using new technologies. At Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) you can find the catalogue of the letters within the Brienne collection and references to the research about them. It is touching to see in Steinz’ book letters of prisoners among these undelivered letters. Yet another lifeline had been locked for them.

In her foreword Steinz gave a place of honor to Francisco de Tassis (1459-1517), the founder of the first European postal service. I could not help remembering only the Thurn und Taxis family in Regensburg, but they are indeed connected with this man. I readily admit that when looking at Vanzieleghem’s blog I was surprised to read in an old French manual for legal history about the postal service of the university of Paris. Its monopoly ended in 1719. Vanzieleghem could not yet find the first royal ordinance issued in 1383 about the postal role of this university which from then on should serve each French diocese.

To me it seems definitely fitting the themes in this post are connected with each other in some way. It will do no harm to compare postal tariffs with printed itineraries. It is also clear spatial history needs a sure foundation on historical research. Letters and postal services vitally connected and connect people just as much as the internet does since a few decades. In Italian legge (laws) and leghe (miles) might look rather similar, and indeed they are not miles apart from each other. Legislation concerning letters and post deserves due attention from legal historians.

An addendum

A good starting point for researching Early Modern postal services is the chapter by Nikolaus Schobesberger et alii, ‘European postal networks’, in: News networks in early Modern Europe, Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds.) (Leiden-Boston, 2016; online in open access) 19-63. This chapter suggests for example the inclusion of key postal stations in the Holy Roman Empire at certain moments can help to date the moment of creation of the contents in printed itineraries. It is good to see both this article and Midura point to Ottavio Codogno’s Nuouo itinerario delle poste per tutto il mondo (Milan 1608) as a very important source.

In the PDF version of the Munich copy of the Poste diverse the date of publication is still indicated as 1550. At p.15 it is also stated the emperor lived sometimes in Prague, altre volte vi abitava la Maestà Cesarea, referring either to the period in the fourteenth century or to the period between 1583 and 1620.

Notarial records and Jewish history in Early Modern Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam

In December 2022 I first spotted SION-Digit, a research project aiming at using notarial acts from Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam to gain new insights into Early Modern Jewish history. Project leader Evelien Chayes received in 2022 media attention for her discovery during this project of a rare letter by Michel de Montaigne amidst records from a notary’s archive held at Bordeaux. Even with only a project blog I think SION-Digit deserves attention here for its goal of using legal records as a historical source showing much hidden things about the history of Jews in Early Modern Europe. One of the things to investigate is the role of digitized records for this project.

Notarial records, a rich resource

Three archival institutions have a pivotal role for the SION-Digit project, the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Archives départementales de la Gironde in Bordeaux and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. The first section of this post will help to come quickly closer to some of the advantages or hindrances to study notarial acts at the three institutions.

The Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) recently launched a nicely designed search engine, moreveneto for searching the many fondi. At first I was slightly disoriented, seeing on one side two collections for notai but also more than 1400 other collections. Using the term notarili brought me to twelve fondi in the 3500 Notarile record group. Fondo 3520 contains indici per parti contraenti per notai, without an indication about the period and only a general statement these indices being incomplete, and fondo 3550 with general chronological indices, however, only for the period 1801-1829. Another attempt at using the general search interface led me to fondo 003, Notarile. Testamenti. Indici with indices for wills from the period 1300-1802, with four subseries. Of course it will take you some time and effort to get used to any guide. Apart from the concise guidance in the section Patrimonio of moreveneto you can used the section Galleria, where I got 13 results for notarile and 8 results for notai, bringing you mostly digitized repertories, but also some notarial records.

At the website of the state archive in Venice you will note with me at Risorse in rete that two earlier online resources, including the digitization platform Progetto Divenire and an earlier online guide, are now part of moreveneto. However, it is not mentioned the ASV contributed also digitized materials to the platform Judaica Europeana, now maintained by the Jewish Heritage Network. The Brandeis University helped creating digital access to eighteenth-century pinkasim, community ledgers held at the ASV.

The website of the departmental archives for the Gironde region in Bordeaux brings you quickly – starting with Recherche and choosing Thèmes – to information about notarial records in their holdings. There is an online search form for the minutier des notaires, where you can search for names, places, and periods, and filter for some specific document genres or limit your search to either minutes or repertories. The AD Gironde holds now some 7 kilometer of notarial records. You will find also a digitized biographical register of notaries created by a group of volunteers between 1987 and 1998. The État général des fonds, too, leads you to this repertory for notaries.

Notarial acts from the Stadsarchief Amsterdam have been presented here already in a number of posts, for example in a post about Rembrandt’s life. In fact this resource genre received much attention from this institution recently. This has resulted in the creation of indices for a great number of acts, now integrated into the general search platform. You can limit your search to particular document genres. At the transcription platform Vele Handen [Many hands] two projects deal with notarial records from Amsterdam, Alle Amsterdamse Akten for creating indices, and Crowd leert computer lezen [Crowd helps computer learning to read] for creating a Transkribus base ground which led to two online public models for computerized transcription, the first for seventeenth-century notarial acts and the second one for the eighteenth century.

In a third project at Vele Handen together with other institutions the Stadsarchief Amsterdam let volunteers add tags to a number of transcribed notarial acts. The results can be found at the Transkribus subdomain Amsterdam City Archives. Interestingly, you can adjust the search mode for fuzzy results. By the way, at the portal Zoek in transcripties [Search in transcriptions] with the other tagged acts from the third project at Vele Handen you will find apart form VOC records as its core a nice selection of notarial records from Dutch provincial and regional archives.

The city archives of Amsterdam offer a concise online introduction to the indices for notarial records, and you can download the repertory of Early Modern notaries created by A.I. Bosma, Repertorium van notarissen residerende in Amsterdam Amstelland, ambachtsheerlijkheden en geannexeerde gemeenten 1524 – 1810 (1998) as a PDF.

Objects, texts and networks

The SION-Digit project has objects, texts and networks as its main focuses. By choosing three towns with a busy harbour the network side of things has surely a good foundation. The transport of people, objects, letters and ideas was very much helped from these towns. A principal aim of this project is to use the wealth of information in notarial acts for delving deeper into Early Modern Jewish history. The core of the project is using and creating digitized access to notarial deeds. At the project blog it is asserted until now state and town archives have not been used as much as the records held at specialised institutions for Jewish history.

The flat statement on the SION-Digit blog notarial acts in these three towns are hard to find or difficult to access is in dire need of some qualification. Luckily the French version of the project aims does not contain this lapidary statement. In view of the repertories for notarial registers at all three archives discussed here above it is simply not true one cannot find these registers or that there are severe blockades for finding them. At Venice there are indices for acts contained in notarial registers. In Bordeaux you can use the online search for the minutier and even find biographical information about individual notaries. The city archives of Amsterdam offer an online repertory of notaries, you can search directly for notarial registers in finding aid 5075, and there are online indices and digitized registers. For a fair number of registers you can even benefit from computerized transcriptions.

The problem for researching these Early Modern notarial acts is the degree of accessibility of individual acts. I guess the project description at the SION-Digit blog stems probably directly from a project proposal for funding, with alas a not uncommon exaggerated picture of gaps to be filled, hidden materials and great vistas awaiting at the completion. More to the point is the wish to combine materials from notarial records with existing projects for pinkasim, Early Modern Jewish community registers. In particular the Pinkasim project of the National Library of Israel is important in this respect. It offers an online repertory of this document genre and digitization of a number of registers stemming from several European Jewish communities. There is also a very extensive bibliography.

Instead of looking here somewhat closer at pinkasim I thought it would be more useful to look at notarial records about Jewish communities in Early Modern Europe. Gaining an overview of such records is helped by the existence of the European Jewish Archives Portal, created by the Yerusha network and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. The portal does list archival collections held at European archives, libraries, museums and documentation centers. There is both a simple search and an advanced search mode, and also an interactive map for finding locations. Very useful are the possibilities to use other spellings, translations and transliterationd of names and locations.

As with all portals and search machines aiming to give complete coverage of any particular subject the search results at Yerusha are subject to the primordial factor of relevant data being available and entered into them. A quick simple search at Yerusha for notaries and notarial records does bring you to descriptions at collection level of archival collections in many European countries, but currently not from France and the Netherlands. For Italy only notarial records at Mantua and Milan are presented. It will do no harm to note the current absence in the Yerusha portal of any information from French and Dutch institutions. The interactive map for holding institutions helps you to detect such gaps.

I will not try to fill in this post all such real or supposed gaps. Within the Italia Judaica portal of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspore Research Center, Tel Aviv University, there is a fine introduction for Venice (in Italian) with a bibliography and footnotes, but alas without any direct reference to notarial records. By the way, the city Venice offers a concise guide to comunal and other archives in Venice. The SIAR is a portal to archives in Venice and the Veneto region. I looked briefly at the website of the Commision Française des Archives Juives (CFAJ). Among the links the CFAJ mentions are the city archives of Bordeaux, and I might as well put here the current link to the Archives Bordeaux Métropole.

Any temptation to go further here with listing my own selection of either randomly or specifically found resources was checked to some extent by visiting the portal site Jewish Heritage Network, another initiative of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, with due attention to archival collections held by institutions for Jewish cultural heritage in Europe. However, it seems not amiss to start looking for notarial records at another central point, the Archives Portal Europe, and to benefit from the search facilities for Dutch notarial acts at the Archieven portal, because many Dutch archives have created indexes for this document genre. If you want to look further for Jewish archival collections, some of them even digitized, I can refer you to my own web page for digital archives with relevant links for a number of countries and periods.

As for notarial records in France it is good to note here the Minutier central des notaires de Paris. The Université de Tours has created the platform Renumar for searching late medieval and sixteenth-century notarial acts from Tours, Amboise, Bourges, Chartres and Chinon. With this project associated is LECTAUREP, an initiative for computerized use of notarial records. In Italy and Spain are several projects which focus on medieval notaries. You can quickly perform yourself a search for minutes notariales and related resources at the French portal FranceArchives to check where you can find them and to see where such records have been digitized.

SION-Digit in action

On October 25, 2023 SION-Digit organizes a symposium ‘Au-delà de l’assignation géographique: Portraits des juifs dans l’Europe prérevolutionnaire’, to be held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Earlier on, in September 2022, the project team organized in Bordeaux a round table on Jewish testimonies in Early Modern France. This year SION-Digit received support from the Biblissima platform. On the central website of the Institut de Recherche d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) there is no additional information about the contents of SION-Digit, sometimes also referred to as SION-Digit Sfarim.

The project blog brings you to more information about the newly found letter by Montaigne, for example an article in Dutch from the newspaper NRC Handelsblad on August 10, 2023 (PDF). Chayes wrote with Alain Legros, ‘Un brouillon inédit de Montaigne parmi des actes notariés’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85/1 (2023) pp. 87-95. At the 2022 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America Evelien Chayes spoke about Letizia Nahmias, a remarkable woman in the seventeenth-century Venetian ghetto. It led to an interview by Esther Voet for the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad 39 (July 8, 2022) pp. 24-25, ‘Een onafhankelijke vrouw in het ghetto’. Finding Letizia’s will was a key moment in understanding her life and actions which were for a long time overshadowed by her husband -also her nephew – who converted to Catholicism.

With SION-Digit we meet an international project on a vast scale developed and for some part to be executed single-handed by a scholar who is at home in the study of Early Modern literature, book history and library history. Her goal of bringing scarcely known aspects of Jewish lives and history into the limelight by using notarial acts should command respect. SION-Digit should invite and deserves support from those scholars better acquainted with notarial records in Italy, France and the Netherlands. The fact Evelien Chayes pinpoints women’s history as a key to detect networks is another stimulating aspect of this project. I wrote here at some length about SION-Digiti Sfarim exactly because Chayes wants to use sources too easily labelled as a territory of legal historians, local historians and genealogists. It is to the benefit of anyone who becomes fascinated by a particular source genre to meet others with their questions, approaches and tools, and to receive mutual support. Connecting scholarly research in various disciplines to gain insight into peoples and networks that tend to be overlooked is in my view a most valuable effort. Mazzeltov, good luck!

A postcript

For finding digital projects concerning Jewish history you can benefit from another international portal, #DHJewish: Jewish History and Digital Humanities, supported again by the Rothschild Foundation and maintained by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (“C²DH”). #DHJewish offers also an online bibliography at Zotero.

Medieval sources for Normandy’s (legal) history

Musing about a possible goal for a holiday this summer France is bound to enter my thoughts! Thus it made me really happy to find a new portal about French regional history with an European dimension. The portal Norécrit. Aus sources de la Normandie. Pratiques de l’écrit das la Normandie médiévale is a project at the Université de Caen Normandie bringing you a tripartite online corpus with sources for legal history, ecclesiastical administration and the history of medieval archives and libraries, in particular for the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. In earlier posts I looked here at Norman customary law and at the cultural heritage in the form of manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. What kind of sources can you find at Norécrit? How does the version presented at the new portal differ from earlier (online) editions?

Familiar and unfamiliar

The portal Norécrit came to my attention thanks to the Réseau des médiévistes belges de langue française (RMBLF) which offers a calendar of scholarly events concerning medieval studies in Europe, and much else, too, such as notices about new publications and online projects. Let’s first chart the institutional constellation for Norécrit. The portal is the fruit of a team at the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (MRSH), and more specifically its unit Centre Michel de Boüard – CRAHAM (UMR 6273). Earlier on this centre launched in cooperation with numerous other institutions already the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. You can read more about the CRAHAM also at its blog Les Échos du Craham.

Law in medieval Normandy

The first section of Norécrit is directly concerned with medieval legal history. The équipe for this section is led by the director of CRAHAM, Laurence Jean-Marie. Under the heading Ecrits nomratif et vitalité économique. Les coutumes des villes et des ports you will find nineteen texts with customary law. Those for harbors contain regulations for tolls, they are not just tariff lists. The introduction states clearly we should not expect too much uniformity. Many texts are not official statements, but instead more privately produced text collections. Texts concerning forestry law have not been included. The Grand Coutumier de Normandie is not mentioned at all, since these texts have clearly a more local range. The Coutumes de la prévôté d’Harfleur (1387) is the first text edited at Norécrit, and the edition comes with a useful introduction and a presentation of the sources. A nineteenth-century edition used only one archival source, but here three medieval sources have been used for the new edition. You can browse the text using the sommaire or use the search function (recherche). This section brings a most valuable addition for the study of customary law in Normandy.

Viewing church life in the archdiocese Rouen

Administration par l’écrit dans l’Église du XIIIe siècle is the theme of the second section, led by Grégory Combalbert, and more specifically the development of the use of written records in the archdiocese Rouen covering the territory of Normandy. Three sources brought together here can show you church life during the thirteenth century in great detail. Apart from a pouillé, an overview of parishes in this archdiocese and episcopal acts from four archbishops the main resource here is the famous register of archiepiscopal visitations created by Eudes (Odo) Rigaud, archbishop from 1248 until 1275.

I suppose I am not the only scholar remembering reading about him in the great synthesis of medieval ecclesiastical history by the late Sir Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth 1970). The concise introduction to the visitations refers to both old and modern literature about this very active archbishop and his register. The edition by Théodose Bonnin, Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis : journal des visites pastorales d’Eude Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen 1248-1269 (Rouen 1852) can be consulted online at Gallica as can also the manuscript Paris, BnF, ms. latin 1245, alas only taken from an old but serviceable microfilm. It is wise to look at the full description of this manuscript at the website of the BnF, too, because it points you to some scholarly articles and the English translation by Sidney M. Brown with an introduction by Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The register of Eudes of Rigaud (New York-London 1964).

A page of the pouillé for Rouen, 1236-1306 – Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 11052, fol, 5v – image source: Paris, BnF

The document with an overview of parishes in the archdiocese Rouen between 1236 and 1306, too, is preserved in a manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Ms. Latin 11052). Léopold Delisle published an edition of the text, ‘Polyptychum Rotomagensis dioecesis’, in: Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France XXIII (Paris, 1876) pp. 228-331. The manuscript has been digitized in full color at Gallica, and you can find a succinct description in the online Archives et manuscrits catalog of the BnF.

Acts of four archbishops of Rouen between 1231 and 1275 form the third and last element in this section. Currently only acts up to 1257 are presented in the online edition. For some acts of Eudes Rigaud copies are found in his register. The edition contains both the texts of original charters and of later copies. The critical apparatus and annotation are all you can desire. It has to be noted that some seventy acts of the 154 acts stem from Eudes Rigaud. This Franciscan scholar and archbishop was clearly in many ways exceptional, but even when you acknowledge the bias caused by his zealous personality he remains most remarkable.

The archives and libraries of monasteries

The third axe of the project at the Université de Caen is led by Marie Bisson and focuses on one particular and very singular abbey, the Benedictine abbey under royal protection of the Mont Saint-Michel. The projected corpus of texts at Norécrit has not yet been completed. As for now you will find liturgical texts, followed by De abbatibus, the chronicle written by abbot Robert de Torigni about earlier abbots, and a subsection with sources concerning miracles happening at or touching Mont Saint-Michel. In a later phase of the project a corpus of texts written and reunited by Dom Thomas Le Roy in 1647 and 1648 will be published, and also the Constitutiones abbatiae Sancti Michaelis (1258) and statutes issued by pope Gregory IX. The constitutions will be edited from the manuscript Avranches, BM, 214, f. 9-16, and the papal statutes are at fol. 8-9 of this manuscript which you can view online in the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. In fact you will find there a description of this manuscript and already the incipits and explicits. It would be helpful if the French team provides this link at Norécrit, too. As an excuse for not doing this they can point to the online journal Tabularia. Sources écrits des mondes normands médiévaux with in the 2019 issue a critical edition of De abbatibus with translations in English and Italian by Pierre Bouet, Marie Bisson and others [‘Écrire l’histoire des abbés du Mont Saint-Michel 3. Édition critique et traduction’]. As a bonus they can point to the blog Mondes nordidiques et normands médiévaux.

Three windows on medieval Normandy

After creating the Bibliothèque virtuell du Mont Saint-Michel with numerous digitized manuscripts, most of them held at Avranches, it is not by coincidence this abbey figures large, too, at the new Norécrit portal. Its preeminence simply cannot be denied, but the portal helps to create a more balanced view in the two other sections. It is is splendid to see customary law at a local and municipal level, thus helping to place the Grand Coutumier de Normandie in its original context. In the Bibliothèque David Hoüard, Bibliothèque numérique de droit normand you can find numerous digitized resources concerning law in Normandy from the Middle Ages onwards. You might want to look also at the blog for the project RIN CONDÉ  (Constitution d’un Droit européen : six siècles de coutumiers normands). By the way, Gallica has among its Essentiels du droit a fine section with books and medieval manuscripts around the Coutume de Normandie. The second section of Norécrit brings together precious and interesting sources on medieval church administration and canon law. When searching for synodal statutes from Rouen you can find fourteen texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Corpus synodalium created at Stanford University.

The connections between Normandy and England, and the position of this duchy within France are obvious reasons for looking at Normandy as a region with European importance already in the medieval period. Hopefully my brief introduction to Norécrit and references to some accompanying projects and blogs helps you to put Normandy into perspective as more than just a lovely region for a summer holiday in France!

A postscript

At the CRAHAM Grégory Combalbert has created an online edition for acts of the bishops of Évreux from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Actes des évêques d’Évreux (xi^e siècle-1223), surely worth mentioning here, too. You can view also images of these charters and acts.

Getting close to medieval papal registers

Even when you are interested in totally different subjects in medieval history emperors, kings and popes attract your attention. Their power and authority make them a natural focus for research, also because the most powerful people and institutions leave a rich track in archival records and manuscripts. Upheavals such as wars, fires and revolutions destroyed parts of this legacy in parchment and paper, but a massive amount of information has survived five or more centuries. The papal curia is rightly seen as one of the earliest and most active medieval bureaucracies. In 2019 the Vatican archives received a new name, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (AAV) instead of the familiar Archivio Segreto Vaticano, a term which could led people to believe enormous secrets still await discovery. In my view the sheer number of documents, the challenge of languages, medieval scripts and intricate legal matters form the real barrier for abundant use of this archive in a class of its own. In this post I will look at the ways medieval papal registers are now made accessible in print and online. However, it is necessary and useful, too, to look also at least briefly at ways to find documents held at the AAV.

This post is also meant as a salute to the upcoming XVIth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, to be held at St. Louis, MO, from July 17 to 23, 2022, and as a service to anyone interested in studying pivotal documents for the study of papal history and medieval canon law. For a real understanding of the documents mentioned here it will not do to merely having a glance at them, you will need to immerse yourself into them, and this will enrich you.

In this post the focus will be on access to the original documents, and much less on projects with databases for papal documents. A number of databases and projects for medieval charters is presented in a recent post.

Finding papal registers from the Middle Ages

Two years ago I stated in a post about digital resources rather flatly you cannot find any online inventory at the website of the AAV. This was not entirely true. In fact the four series of medieval papal registers are the very exception to my observation. I had better give you immediately the links to the inventories for these series:

– Registra Avenioniensia (RA) 1-349
– Registra Lateranensia (RL) 1-138 / 498-534 / 925-1126, 1128
– Registra Supplicationum (RS) 1-265 / 479 – 509 / 961-1169
– Registra Vaticana (RV) 1-545 / 772-884

These inventories can be found in the section for publications of the AAV website. I had not realized that the lists with the contents of the four cd-rom sets give you in fact at least a partial inventory of these registers. The cd-roms are only available at research libraries and cannot be accessed worldwide online. You will notice with me these four inventories seemingly do not list all registers of the four series, and I will come back to this fact quickly. For your convenience the overview of papal registers in chronological order by pope from Innocent III to Benedict XIII offered by the Centre Pontifical d’Avignon is very useful.

The modern editions of papal registers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries form the core of the subscription-only online resource Ut per litteras apostolicas hosted by Brepols. The overview of the Brepolis resources portal gives you a useful concise list of the modern editions published by French scholars since the late nineteenth century. In a period with no or very limited physical access to libraries I felt hard pressed to find a list of these editions in print. My copy of Raoul van Caenegem and François Ganshof, Encyclopedie van de geschiedenis der middeleeuwen (Ghent 1962) is a bit old. This first edition in Dutch contains relevant information at pages 211 to 215. Somewhat newer is my copy of Winfried Baumgart, Bücherverzeichnis zur deutschen Geschichte. Hilfsmittel-Handbücher-Quellen (12th ed., Munich 1997) with information on pages 170 to 173. The information given by Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke and Benoît-Michel Tock (eds.), Diplomatique médiévale (Turnhout 1993) at pp. 333-338 contains less details for the two major French edition series, but the editors send you rightly to the book of Thomas Frenz, Papsturkunden des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Stuttgart 1986).

On April 24, 2021 Yvonne Searle published a valuable post with links to various resources with editions of medieval papal documents. The editions of papal registers from the thirteenth and fourteenth century form just a section of her contribution. For these editions she points mainly to digitized versions in the Internet Archive and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. I hesitated to add here for a number of these registers links to Gallica and Princeton Theological Commons, but it would have been repeating a job already sufficiently well done.

Not only for English readers you might sooner or later, but preferably as soon as possible turn to the guide by the late Leonard Boyle, A survey of the Vatican Archives and of its medieval holdings (Toronto 1972; new edition 2001). Almost seventy pages of this book deal with medieval papal registers. Even a cursory reading of these pages should make you aware of the danger of any superficial approach of these registers. The general remarks in my post should be seen in the light of Boyle’s detailed explanations and telling examples. As a student I was explicitly told to read first this classic guide before going to Rome or Vatican City. His book should for once and all teach you the fact you need to know not only about the inventories or the editions, but also use every reliable guide you can find. Just reading Boyle’s remark that some Avignonese registers have been placed among the Registra Vaticana and vice versa should serve as a wake up call. For English readers his remarks about the contents of the various calendars created in England from papal registers are a must read. Instead of going blissfully unaware to digitized calendars at the British History portal reading Boyle’s explanations should alert you to many things concerning the study of papal registers.

Guidance to records of the medieval papacy

Far more voluminous than the surprisingly concise guide offered by Boyle is the guide created by Francis Blouin et alii (eds.), An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See (Oxford 1998). First of all this fruit of the Michigan project (1984-2004) goes beyond the AAV also to other archives in Rome. There is an online version of Blouin’s guide at ArchiveGrid showing introductions to many hundred archival collections, including to the series with papal registers from the High Middle Ages. You can also benefit from the 2019 edition of the Indice dei Fondi e relativi mezzi di descrizione e di ricerca dell’Archivio segreto Vaticano is available online (PDF). The concise introduction to medieval papal records offered at the website of the Vatican Film Library should be mentioned here, too.

For studying records of the medieval papacy there is a wealth of scholarly literature. Some most useful basic introductions to the most important relevant works can be found in the section Analyzing Sources of the multilingual Swiss history portal Ad fontes (Universität Zurich). Searching for relevant scholarly literature is much helped by the online bibliography of the Regesta Imperii project in Mainz. The Regesta Imperii lists among its publications also the volumes of Papstregesten, systematic summaries of papal charters for the period 800 to 1198, an important help in studying this resource. An online resource in Munich, the Bibliographischer Datenbank Historische Grundwissenschaften, can be helpful, too, for finding literature. Both the database in Mainz and Munich can be searched with keywords (Schlagwort), the Munich database only in German. The portal LEO-BW (Landeskunde Entdecken Online-Baden Württemberg) has within its Südwestedeutsche Archivalienkunde [Archivistics for South-West Germany) in the section on charters (Urkunden) an illustrated introduction to papal charters, Papsturkunden by Anja Thaller. She points to online resources and mentions literature on several aspects.

Finding digitized papal records and manuscripts

In the compass of just one blog contribution it would in the end not help much to put in here literally everything. At my legal history website Rechtshistorie the page about canon law mentions a fair number of online projects concerning the medieval papacy. Over the years I have written here several posts on documents and manuscripts connected with the medieval papacy. In 2016 I published for example a post about the Palatini, the manuscripts originally from the library of the dukes of the Pfalz in Heidelberg brought to the Vatican Library in 1623 and now being digitized. Some manuscripts returned to Heidelberg, others remain in Vatican City.

Finding digitized manuscripts in the Vatican Library is easy thanks to the portal Digital Vatican Library. Perhaps it is more surprising to find also digitized archival records of the papacy at this portal. In my 2020 post about the 1352-1358 interdict on the city of Dordrecht I mentioned a number of digitized source editions, not only for the Avignonese papacy, but also for Dutch medieval history and the Vatican. My biographical research into a particularly interesting lawyer connected with the Dordrecht case led me to a latarium, a digitized register of verdicts and fines from the civil tribunal in Avignon (BAV, Vat. lat. 14774). Fourteen lataria ( BAV, Vat. lat. 14761 to 14774) have been digitized. Within the section for archives of this digital library you can find several small archival collections. There are also five notarial registers from Orange. I am quite aware that it might be possible to find more archival records among the digitized manuscripts of the BAV, and I hope to add them here or elsewhere.

It is harder to find digitized records online from the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano. Registers Introitus et Exitus of the Camera Apostolica between 1316 and 1324 (John XXII) 1334 and 1342 (Benedict XII) are the subject of digital editions as part of the project Ressources comptables en Dauphiné, Provence, Savoie et Venaissin (XIIIe-XVe siècle) with medieval accounts from four French regions and the papacy in Avignon and the region around this city, the Venaissin. Here, too, figures a papal register (Reg.Av. 46) among quite different resources, but it contains indeed accounts. In 2020 I thought this edition included also digitized images, but this is not the case.

Sometimes an approach from another direction can be helpful. We are used nowadays to viewing online digitized manuscripts and archival records in full color. The manuscripts digitized by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana show a sometimes irritating watermark. Aaron Macks helps you every week to information about recently digitized manuscripts from the BAV. In former times scholars would often have no choice but to use black-and-white microfilms. The Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, offers not only microfilms but also a useful overview by genre of manuscripts at the Vatican Library, an overview of papal registers, and the Metascripta portal for online research with Vatican manuscripts, mainly Vaticani Latini. On the page for medieval law of my website I mention more (digitized) microfilm collections.

A few years ago a team at the Università Roma Tre started the project In Codice Ratio for creating computerized character recognition in order to make possible automate transcription of handwritten text. In this project archival records from the AAV will be transcribed. As for now you can find the data set with the initial input and the ground truth, the set of images and transcriptions with a degree of error free results.

Many roads, many wishes

This post brings you perhaps less than you had expected, but it is longer than I assumed. Originally I planned a post dealing with text editions, digital libraries, inventories and digitized archival records. In the end I am happy I could recently write here about databases with medieval charters, among them papal charters, and in 2020 the papacy at Avignon figured large in a post. Thus the results here are at least less confusing and profuse. However, it was necessary to show indeed the variety of resources and some of the difficulties in using them for historical research, and in particular for legal history. If there had been a clear starting point for using online digitized records at the AAV I would surely have started here with them. The sheer mass of relevant text editions is overwhelming, although the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography is perhaps too generous in adding the label Papacy to many editions. Using multiple resources has as one implication thinking out of the box and working interdisciplinary without much ado. Legal history, too, should not be a confined discipline, a kind of silo as is the current phrase. Our discipline is well placed to question the use of digital resources when you or your students do not have the necessary skills and training to use them to their full extent. Combining such training and experience in using original sources should help you to tap the wealth of digitized medieval sources, and at the same time to be aware of what more can be found, what has been lost and which traces of such lost resources can enrich your research.

A postscript

Of course I was curious enough to find out quickly more about digitized registers among the manuscripts in the digital Vatican Library. For example, the manuscript BAV, Ross. 733 is a fifteenth-century register of taxes paid for the collation of diocesan sees. However, I should first of all add some registers from Avignon, starting with Vat. Lat 14775 with criminal inquests for the years 1365-1368 (copy in black and white), Vat. lat 14776 and Vat. lat. 14777 with verdicts in civil cases from 1364 and 1372, Vat.lat 14478, 14479 (fragments) and 14780, also from the fourteenth century. The descriptions of these registers clearly lack the word latarium for quick identification and grouping of Vat. Lat. 14761 to 14780.

Klaus Graf alerts at Archivalia to the fact a number of digitized edition of papal registers within the Hathi Trust Digital Library can be reached in open access only from the United States. Thus there is indeed space for another list of digital copies of these editions. Graf points also to some resources from Germany.

Jacques Cujas and legal humanism

Portrait of Jacques Cujas – anonymous painting, 17th century – Musée du Vieux Toulouse, Inv 22.5.1 – image Wikimedia Commons

Tracing the influence of famous lawyers is not a straightforward thing. Some scholars were already famous during their life, others exerted a lasting influence through their pupils or by their published works, sometimes only decades after their death. Reputation can be an obstacle to critical assessment of achievements. The recent publication of a monograph about Jacques Cujas (1522-1590) helps to create a new focus on Cujacius and his importance as a lawyer, professor and legal humanist. On March 28-29, 2022 a conference will be held at Paris with a telling title, Jacques Cujas 1522-2022. La fabrique d’un “grand juriste”. In this post I will look at the congress program and look at some aspects of Cujas’ life and work as foundations for his influence, first in France and later in other European countries and beyond Europe.

The importance of biography

Xavier Prévost (Université Bordaux) is responsible for bringing Cujas into the limelight again in this century. After his voluminous thesis Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Le droit à l’épreuve de l’humanisme, defended in 2012 in Paris, he published Jacques Cujas (1522-1590), Jurisconsulte humaniste (Genève 2015) and a shorter work Jacques Cujas (1522-1590) (Paris 2018) as a part of the series Histoire litttéraire de la France.

A quick search for more information sheds light on the scale of the commemoration of Cujas’ five-hundredth birthday. The platform France Mémoire has created an online dossier for the 2022 activities around Cujas. The Bibliothèque Cujas, the central law library of the Université de Paris, will launch on March 28 a virtual exhibition about Cujas, a most welcome thing. Obviously the link to the online exhibit does not yet function. The physical exhibition at this library well be on display until June 24, 2022. Prévost will hold a lecture in Paris on the theme “La (seconde) Renaissance du droit romain” on March 17, 2022.

The program (PDF) of the conference on March 28-29, 2022, shows a most sensible approach in several layers which also can be helpful to view other legal humanists in Early Modern Europe in different settings. The local approach contains papers looking at some places where Cujas was active, Turin in the paper by Valerio Gigliotti (Turin) and Toulouse in the paper by Florent Garnier (Toulouse). The section on patrimoine (heritage) has the arts and literature as its subject. Jacqueline Lalouette (Lille) will discuss sculptures of Cujas, and Valérie Hayaert (Warwick) will speak about Cujas and the arts. Literature is the theme in the contribution of Stéphan Geonget (Tours). In the international section the reception of Cujas in Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain and the Dutch Republic will be discussed, with papers by Diego Quaglioni (Trento), John Cairns (Edinburgh), Rafael Ramis Barceló (Universitat de las Illes Balears), and Laurens Winkel (emeritus, Rotterdam). The final section on historiography looks at the representation of Cujas in general history, for example in biographical dictionaries during the Ancien Régime, and of course within the field of legal history, Anne Rousselet-Pimont (Paris) will speak about the place of Cujas in the works of the French arrêtistes. Pierre Bonin (Paris) will discuss dictionaries. Géraldine Cazals (Bordeaux) and Anne-Sophie Chambost (Lyon) will confront the theme of Cujas’ authority, in partciual after the French Revolution.

A very active life

The sheer number of themes at this two-day conference in itself is already interesting. What made Cujas so special among French lawyers? Let’s look quickly at the main points of Cujas’ life. Either in 1520 or 1522 he saw the light of life in Toulouse, He studied law in his home town. After teaching in Toulouse from 1547 to 1554 he did not become a professor in Toulouse, and this started a career which brought him to a number of French cities: Cahors (1554), Bourges (1555-1556, 1559-1565, and 1575-1590), Valence (1557-1559 and 1567-1575). In 1575 he taught briefly in Paris, and outside France he lectured in Turin (1566). In Bourges you can visit the Hôtel Cujas, home since 1875 to the Musée de Berry. The variety of cities and his long stay at Bourges pinpoint the fact that he was not just a great successor to Andrea Alciato who had also taught at Bourges, making it into virtually the main French city for legal humanism.

When you start searching for Early Modern printed editions of his works, for example within the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, St. Andrews) the very first – and quite rare – work called Catalogus legum antiquarum (…) (Paris 1555; USTC no. 154264) has a title showing already the different path he was to follow. A focus on order is clearly visible. Cujas devoted much time to reconstructing the original works of Roman lawyers such as Ulpian. Cujas did not just study the Justinian Digest, Code and the institutes. He published one of the earliest critical editions of the Codicis Theodosiani libri XVI (Lyon 1566; USTC no. 158074). Writing a commentary on the Libri Feudorum was not the next thing you would expect. Among the earliest edition of his De feudis libri V is an edition Heidelberg 1567 (USTC no. 629710). He commented also the Justinian Novellae (first published as Novellarum constitutionum impp. Justiniani expositio (Cologne 1569; USTC no. 678571). Thus Cujas studied the Corpus Iuris Civilis in its full width, but he studied also earlier and later sources for Roman law. He did not bring the first edition of the Basilica, but he certainly drew attention to this importance source of Byzantine law with his Latin translation [Basilikon liber LX (…) (Lyon 1566; USTC no. 154652).

With Cujas you see not just a professor with only interest in Roman law in its original form. Like many other Early Modern law professors he wrote legal consultations and published them, too [Consultationum liber singularis (Cologne 1577; USTC no. 664682)]. However, characteristically he opened his collection with an edition of the Consultatio veteris cuiusdam iurisconsulti, the very editio princeps of this text. I will not mention here any other titles of his works, apart from his Observationes et emendationes, a modest title taken from other humanists expanded in every edition. All in all the USTC gives references to some 180 editions of Cujas’ works, most of them published after his death in 1590. Of course this is just an impression of Cujas’ printed legacy: The USTC stops at 1650, and searching in for example the Heritage of the Printed Book database (CERL) will show you re-editions of his works until the mid-eighteenth century. For Cujas at least four Opera omnia editions exist. It is good to note that Ernst Spangenberg devoted many pages of his study Jacob Cujas und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig 1822) to a detailed bibliographical overview of Cujas’ published works.

Cujas taught scholars who became famous in their own right, too. Jacques-Auguste De Thou, Josephus Justus Scaliger, Jacques Labitte, Antoine Loysel, Pierre Daniel, Pierre Pithou and Étienne Pasquier are just some of them. Through Pierre Daniel some of Cujas’ manuscripts came in the hands of Jacques Bongars (1554-1612) whose large library eventually arrived at the Burgerbibliothek in Bern. You might jump to the conclusion all these men occupied themselves mainly with either law or Classical Antiquity, but for example Antoine Loysel (1536-1617) studied in particular French customary law. Étienne Pasquier (1529-1615) was a poet, but also a member of the royal Chambre des comptes.

Influence beyond borders

A Dutch and even Utrecht connection with Cujacius is mentioned by the indefatigable Danish historian Jen Jensen Dodt van Flensburg (1800-1847) who devoted so much energy in unlocking sources for the history of Utrecht. In his article ‘Doctoraal diploma, door Jac. Cujacius in 1586 verleend aan Everard van de Poll, Utrechtenaar’, Bijdragen tot regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving 5 (1830) 67-69 – online at Delpher – he gives the text of the doctoral degree conferred by Cujas in Bourges to Van de Poll (died 1602), later on the advocate of the States of Utrecht, a benefactor of the city Utrecht with his workhouse and the posthumous gift of his library to the city library, eventually part of the collections of Utrecht University Library. Interestingly this text also mentions Bernardinus de Monte Valdone (died 1618), a student from The Hague, who later on served as the advocaet-fiscael of the Hof van Utrecht, the provincial tribunal. Dodt wrote more about Cujas in another article for the Bijdragen tot regtsgeleerdheid en wetgeving 6 (1831-1832) 1-33.

In Cujas we see a scholar aiming not only to find out about the original order of Roman law, but also preparing new approaches to contemporary law by reinvigorating the study of Roman law, and inspiring numerous students to follow the paths of both law and history as twin subjects. Cujas was able to inspire his own students and later generations with his wide knowledge and deep insights. No wonder he defies easy labeling, and this invites scholars since four centuries to look at his achievements and legacy from many perspectives. The sixteenth century saw in France a galaxy of legal humanists, each of them with distinct qualities taking part in the emerging Republic of Letters, and influencing much else, too, in politics, government and the development of law and justice in their age. Studying legal humanists helps you to rethink approaches of legal history for our time, too.

French laws between 1795 and 1799

Interpreting the French Revolution is a kind of historical industry. New interpretations and fresh assessments sometimes seem to tumble over each other or follow in relatively quick succession. Some watersheds remain visible, at least for those not immersed in the latest relevant literature. The fall of Robespierre and the end of the Great Terror in 1795 mark a period, as does the coming to power of Napoleon in 1799. The period between 1795 and 1799 with the Directoire might seem a minor interruption of the chain of revolutionary developments.

In my series of posts on the French Revolution I have put legal developments at the centre. With the completion and launch of a database with legislation enacted between 1795 and 1799 it becomes possible to look again at sweeping views of the character of the French Revolution. Did it really only destroy the Ancien Régime or did it build lasting structures at a legal level? Did only Napoleon erect a final new legal order with his Code civil and Code penal? Let’s look here at the database La Loi de la Révolution française 1789-1799, available at the ARTFL platform of the University of Chicago. What are the qualities of this project long known for its acronym ANR LexDir?

Legislative activity under the Directoire

In 2015 I published here my post ‘Laws and the French Revolution’. Whatever the merits of this contribution with lots of information concerning digital projects featuring information related to French legal history in the late eighteenth century, it remains a surprisingly often visited post. Over the years I have made some adjustments and additions to it. The French research project ANR LexDir started some ten years ago, but only now I spotted news about its completion and the launch of the database at the end of the international scholarly meeting La Directoire fait sa loi! held by the Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne on September 9-11, 2021. You can download the program (PDF) of this event.

The sheer number of laws and decrees enacted between 1789 and 1799 is much larger than you would guess at first. Modern national parliaments and the European Union do have a substantial legal production nowadays, but the members of the revolutionary assemblées succeeded in creating a massive quantity of legal enactments. How did they have any spare time for steering the French Revolution through all perils?! At the ARTFL platform the project team with Yann Arzel Durelle-Marc, Anne Simonin and Pierre Serna underlines in their concise introduction the fact the French Revolution was a highly legal phenomenon, something already noted by Jules Michelet with his vignette “le triomphe du droit”. The new resource should enable you to put such statements in due perspective.

The new platform at ARTFL offers not only the legislation published between 1795 and 1799, but also the laws published since 1789 in the Collection Baudouin which remains separately available. The Collection du Louvre – with eighteen volumes covering the years 1791 to 1794 – is the source for a part of the legislation covered also by the Collection Baudouin, with 85 volumes for the period 1789-1799. Its volumes 68 to 85 cover the Directoire from October 1795 to December 1799. In fact if you like to focus on either one of these collections you can directly go for them at the search interface.

With the database at the ARTFL platform comes the rich search functionality of Philologic4. Not only you can browse for a particular year and use a general free search option, but also a recherche avancée enabling you to look at contexts, collocation and chronology of laws. The advanced search mode allows you to filter out headings, to skip indexes, to use either normal (Gregorian) or revolutionary dates, and to filter for subjects and titles of laws, to mention only the most important features. These filters are also at hand in a filter panel to the right of search results. You can present results with only the exact text or show them in their context. My first impression is that of a veil lifted from an amorphous mass of information. The feeling you can search here in full depth is most attractive and promising.

How should one appreciate the value of this new online resource? It is one thing to be able to use digitized works, for example in the splendid selection Essentiels du droit of the Gallica digital library showing you many sources for French legal history, but searching in these sources is another thing. A database gives you new search opportunities. Having at your disposal all revolutionary legislation coming from the capital and being able to use it as a textual corpus helps you to put materials from outside Paris from the various départements into more and deeper relief, to mention just one possible approach. In the next paragraph we will see how French revolutionary legislation does not have to be studied as a single or isolated subject.

The wonders of ARTFL

Some recent additions at the ARTFL platform merit particular mention, too. The section What’s new at ARTFL has much to offer! The ten volumes of the Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre have become available online. You can use the Philologic Federated Bibliography for bibliographic research across all ARTFL resources.

Most interesting for legal historians and everyone else is the first version of the Intertextual Hub, a portal for searching with one search action in a number of resources, among them nearly 26,000 French revolutionary pamphlets digitized by The Newberry Library in Chicago, the Archives parlementaires and also revolutionary laws, the latter with an English search interface. Add to them the Journaux de Marat and eighteenth-century works on political thought and economy for the Goldsmith-Kress collection, and you will agree with me this new hub is indeed most valuable. Among similarly searchable resources elsewhere I should mention the newspaper Le Moniteur Universel (1789-1830). Florida State University has created a searchable version of this gazette nationale.

In view of the riches awaiting you both in this alluring Intertextual Hub and in the database with French revolutionary legislation from 1789 until the end of 1799 you will probably not want to read here much longer than absolutely necessary! I will end with warm thanks to the research team in Paris and the ARTFL staff at Chicago for bringing this project to a successful conclusion. I had best offer you here below the links to the complete series of my posts concerning legal history and the French Revolution.

The first article in this series, ‘Laws and the French Revolution’, appeared in February 2015. The second article came in June 2015, ‘Some notes on the history of tolerance’. A third post was published in March 2016, ‘Images and the road to the French Revolution’. The fourth post from August 2016 focused on legal briefs before, during and after the French Revolution, ‘Legal rhetorics and reality in Early Modern France: The factums’. Among earlier posts you might still like to look at ‘Rousseau at 300 years: nature and law’ (2012).

A great institution at 200: The École des Chartes

Jubilees come in various forms. Some are obviously too arbitrary or only remotely interesting, others call rigthly for your time and attention. Among French educational institutions the grandes établissements take pride of place. The École nationale des chartes (ENC) in Paris is surely very special among them. In 2021 it celebrates its bicentenary. Although it is obvious to make a comparison with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, commemorated here in 2019 for its own bicentenary, the ENC distinguishes itself by being a school for archivists and paleographers. In this post I will look at the fundamental aspects of the ENC, some of its former pupils and at some famous episodes from its history.

The institutional setting

The royal ordinance of February 22, 1821 for the foundation of the ENC – image ENC

Fairly recently the ENC became a part of the Université PSL (Paris Sciences & Lettres) after a period as part of the university Paris Sorbonne, hence the different URL’s for some elements of its current digital presence. I had better start here with stating that the ENC is formally not a grande école or grand établissement with an independent status, but it ranks decidedly with its equals. I should tell you also immediately I am deeply impressed by a work on the development of history as a profession in France during the nineteenth century, written by Pim den Boer, Geschiedenis als beroep. De professionalisering van de geschiedbeoefening in Frankrijk (1818-1914) (NIjmegen 1987). This study helps you very much to see major institutions, minor and major figures and developments in their context. During the nineteenth century the ENC provided France in the first place with archivists and paleographers who put their work in archives at the service of historians. The chartistes did write theses, but these stayed closed to the documents; aktengemäss was Den Boer’s vignette for their production. We tend to associate the ENC with critical source editions, but producing book length editions is a much later development. The ENC shows its core qualities in the new critical edition of the royal ordinance of February 22, 1821 founding this institution, available online as a PDF and introduced with a video.

The creation of a journal by the ENC, the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (BEC) in 1839 was an initiative of the newly founded Société de l’École des Chartes. It is one of the oldest still existing scientific journals. You can find digitized issues at the Persée portal up to 2015. Among the issues from this century are some thematic volumes. With its training in the auxiliary historical sciences and its insistence on using historical research methods the ENC soon became a model institution. Dlplomatics, paleography, chronolology and sigillography are perhaps the best known auxiliary sciences for historians. These disciplines are still taught at the ENC, but next to the classic training for archivists the ENC offers four other masters. digital humanities for historians, digital humanities, transnational history and medieval studies. At the Theleme portal the ENC offers course materials, dossiers on several themes, and a number of bibliographies. You can benefit for example from the materials on book history in the Cours section. When reading Early Modern French documents you will encounter abbreviations listed in the Dictionnaire des abréviations françaises.

The ENC uniquely has both a library and a journal called bibliothèque, and both deserve some attention here. Its collections brought the library a recognition for excellence (Collections d’Excellence). Of course there is also a bibliothèque numérique, with apart form licensed resources also three digital collections from its own holdings, and three virtual exhibits. For the theses of students the library has created a subdomain in its digital library called ThENC@. On a second subdomain Theses you search in all these since 1840. PhD theses defended at the ENC between 2013 and 2020 are conveniently mentioned in a list.

Celebrating a bicentenaire

Of course it is clear the projected celebrations for the bicentenaire could only partially proceed in its original planned format. I will therefore skip presenting the program, except for the special issue on the jubilee published by the history journal L’Histoire (PDF). It is much more interesting to look at some of the educational platforms creaetd by the ENC, one of them put online only a few weeks ago.

The French sense for structure has led the ENC to create yet another subdomain for is applications with the nice abbreviation DH, because a number of them are a part of digital humanities. You can have a look at applications under development, too. The best known is perhaps Éditions en ligne de l’École des chartes (Élec), with currently 32 electronic editions. A few years ago I wrote here a contribution about Graziella Pastore’s edition of the Livre de jostice et de plet. The most used online edition is probably the great dictionary – actually formally only a glossary – for medieval Latin created by Charles de Fresne du Cange. The theme range of the editions is really wide. There are also some acts of scientific congresses, and for example a repertory for medieval French translations of texts in classical Latin and Greek. Among other projects I simply did not know about the online version of the Dictionnaire topographique de la France (DicoTopo,) a very useful tool for tracing French (historical) geographical locations.

I had expected to find here also a reference to the Theleme portal, but the ENC views this as an educational resource. Theleme stands for Techniques pour l’Histoire en Ligne:: Études, Manuels, Exercices, Bibliographies, a host of things much needed by (French) historians. The bibliographies for the historical auxiliary disciplines are splendid. Among the tutorials (cours) I would single out those dealing with book and printing history. The Dictionnaire des abréviations françaises should inspire palaeographers worldwide to create similar tools showing abbreviations for their own country and language. The dossiers documentaires offer both historical and palaeographic commentaries for images of charters and other documents in French and Latin from France. They offer students a most useful introduction in studying medieval and later documents.

The latest addition to the fleet of subdomains and digital projects of the ENC is ADELE (Album de diplomatique en ligne), an online project providing images of medieval charters for diplomatics, the study of charters as an auxiliary historical discipline, a classic activity at the ENC since its foundation.

Beyond reading old scripts

Being able to study old scripts was perhaps the thing most clear to outsiders about chartistes. It was not a coincidence professors at and former students of the ENC got involved in looking at the infamous document posing itself as evidence in the Dreyfus case around 1900. Interestingly chartistes were found both among the dreyfusards, those defending captain Dreyfus, and among his fierce opponents. In an earlier contribution I looked at this case and the importance of a newly found secret dossier. I remember in particular reading the article about the position of former élèves by Bertrand Joly, ‘L’École des Chartes et l’Affaire Dreyfus’, BEC 147 (1989) 611-671 (online, Persée).

It is not entirely by chance that the scientist René Girard (1923-2015) , one of the most famous former students of the ENC, became interested in the role and importance of mechanisms for blaming people. His theories about scapegoat mechanisms made him most interesting for anthropologists, but legal historians, too, have to be aware of such phenomena, and not only when dealing with criminal law. Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) became an author of famous novels, foremost the series Les Thibaut (1922-1940), which brought him in 1937 the Nobel Prize for literature.

The ENC does not have its own various series of source editions like its slightly older German counterpart, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, but its professors and former students certainly produced numerous critical editions in the classic French series such as the Classiques de l’Histoire de France. Many theses defended at the ENC have as its core a source edition. Today the ENC offers four master degrees, including a degree for digital humanities, beside the original course for archiviste-paléographe. Its horizon goes beyond the Middle Ages. The MGH offer currently summer schools in the historical auxiliary sciences, but the institute does not have a school. A number of German historians did contributed editions for the MGH or were at some time a staff member. Both institutions have their own distinctive qualities and know an equally rich history with sometimes dramatic periods. Both deserve laurels as pioneers and models for contributing to historical research in Europe. For me 2021 would not be complete here without a commemoration of the ENC’s bicentennial!

Power and colour. Illuminated French charters

Every now and then you encounter on the web projects and initiatives you simply want to share with others. Today I noticed the blog of a project around illuminated French charters. The long bilingual title says a lot: Macht, Diplomatie und Dekor – Pouvoir et diplomatie par l‘enluminure. Die illuminierte Urkunde in Frankreich – Les chartes enluminées en France 1160 – ca. 1420. For shortness‘ sake the blog luckily has the concise name Carta Franca! The blog accompanies the project on Macht und Diplomatie, power and diplomacy of Gabriele Bartz and Jonathan Dumont at the Institut für Mittelalterforschung of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The objects at the centre of this project can be viewed online at Monasterium.net as a subsection of a larger section with illuminated medieval charters at this portal, a result from the project at the university of Graz. What does illumination mean as an element of acts written on parchment? How come art history and the history of diplomacy, diplomatics and legal history together? In this contribution I like to put the spotlight on thees questions.

Multiple perspectives

My curiosity for the subject of this post comes not only from my interest in legal iconography and medieval history. As a student I completed almost a minor in medieval art history. The riches of the library for art history at Utrecht University and the presence of a copy of the famous Index of Christian Art helped to develop my interests in this field.

Medieval charters show always to some extent power, first of all the power to document acts by writing, by creating a document and by authenticating it with a sign, in particular with seals. In 2019 I wrote here about the visual power of seals, and seals figured also in my 2019 post on digital approaches to medieval charters.

The illuminated initial of a royal charters with the heads of both the king and queen, 1332 – image Paris, Archives Nationales, J 357 A no. 4bis

At Carta Franca art history and diplomatics are the main focus. Since 2020 five contributions take art history as their starting point. Really spectacular is the recent post by Gabriele Bartz – in German – concerning a royal charter from 1332 showing both the heads of king Philippe VI (reigned 1328-1350) and his wife Jeanne de Bourgogne in the illuminated double initial, the first two letters of the charter. In this act the king changed his marriage gift to the queen, because he had decided to destine his original gift for her to his son. Bartz compares this charter with some contemporary examples and tries to establishes a link with known illuminators in this period. At Monasterium this charter is presented with a summary of the contents, a description, a commentary and bibliographical references.

Surprising in this category is also the contribution focusing on the decoration of the plica, the small folded lower part of a charter to which seals are attached. Even historians do not always look carefully at a plica in order to check for any chancery marks or remarks. Sometimes scribes scribbled knots, others turned circles into faces, yet another draw eyes on both sides of the threads connecting the seal to the charter. Bartz views these drawings as an innovation of the mid-fourteenth century. Both contributions show a judicious balance between art history and other historical disciplines.

The illuminated initial of a royal charter, 1372 September 28 – Paris, AN, P/1334/17 A, no. 36 (detail)

The category Diplomatik / Diplomatique – to be distinguished from Diplomatie, diplomacy! – contains currently just one contribution in French by Jonathan Dumont, La foi au secours du droit, faith helping the law. A charter of king Charles V from 1372 is illuminated with a large initial C at the beginning. To the drawing lines from three psalms have been added [Ps. 7 (8),7, Ps. 45 (46),16-17 and Ps. 112 (113),2], and also the title of the Easter hymn Christus vincit, Christus regnat. In this charter Charles V confirmed the last will of his deceased brother Louis d‘Anjou and instructed his officials not to interfere with the execution of its stipulations. Dumont places the words in the realm of transcendental representation of kings and royal power, and he nicely notes also this act runs against normal law calling for diligence with last wills. For Dumont it is also a matter of dynastic power at work in favour of his late brother. This charter, too, is fully commented at the Monasterium charter portal. Of course this single contribution wets the appetite for more posts from the perspective of diplomatics and legal history.

Charters in context

The project in Vienna started in August 2020 and will run until 2023. Not only royal charters will come into view. Bishops and monasteries, too, issued illuminated charters. The projected corpus of some 1,300 charters will become visible at Monasterium. Within its general section for illuminated charters there are currently six subcollections, not only for France, but also for the most splendid examples, called Cimelia (sometimes called Prunkurkunden), charters from Lombardy and papal charters. There is also a glossary in German for the terms used in describing illuminated charters. By the way, the Monasterium portal has a multilingual interface, but not every element has been translated.

In fact there are even more similar collections at Monasterium. The collection or subset with French illuminated charters has only been added on December 2, 2021. Thus it is certainly useful to check the list of recent additions at Monasterium. As for now the collection overview shows thirteen collections with illuminated charters. The portal contains now contains information about and often also images for charters from nearly 200 archives in fifteen European countries. You can approach the 660,000 charters included currently by archival collection and by research collection or through an index search. The Monasterium portal has developed into a major resource for research concerning medieval charters. The section for illuminated charters is the fruit of the project in Graz led by Martin Roland, Georg Vogeler and Andreas Zajic.

The medium is the message

The research into the existence, form and role of late medieval illuminated charters can help to view charters differently. Not only the legal act transmitted in a charter is important. Its importance can be expressed more convincingly and visible by using illumination and illustration. More precisely, these added elements can highlight other messages not spelled out in the text of the charter. The illumination of charters adds a second layer of information, operating on another level of action and perception, sometimes showing simply the richness of the issuing person, sometimes highlighting an aspect of his power or showing the intent to put this power in a particular light.

Following the progress of the Carta Franca project in Vienna is helped by the blog and its Twitter account @Cartafranca1. A project website is often static or just a part of larger portal, and even so often project results appear elsewhere. Publications in print from the contributors to these projects on illuminated charters have of course appeared, too. To mention just some examples, Martin Roland contributed the article ‘Illuminierte Urkunden. Bildmedium und Performanz‘ to the essay volume Die Urkunde: Text – Bild – Objekt, Andrea Steildorf (ed.) (Berlin 2019). Gabriele Bartz and Markus Gneiss edited the volume Illuminierte Urkunden. Beiträge aus Diplomatik, Kunstgeschichte und Digital Humanities (Cologne-Weimar-Vienna 2018; Archiv für Diplomatik, Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde, Beiheft 16). The project in Vienna follows after research projects about illuminated medieval manuscripts in Central Europe. The connection with manuscript production is just one of the perspectives helping to study the subject of illuminated charters. In the brief compass of this contribution I hope to have made you curious, too, about new ways to study a classic source genre for medieval history and some of the tools making such research possible.

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.

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.