Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages: Formal Aspects of Written Communication (Books, Charters, and Inscriptions)

556 Pages·2016·7.341 MB·English

by  Sébastien Barret, Dominique Stutzmann, Georg Vogeler

RULING THE SCRIPT IN THE MIDDLE AGES
UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY
35
UTRECHT STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERACY
General Editor
Marco Mostert (Universiteit Utrecht)
Editorial Board
Gerd Althoff (Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität Münster)
Michael Clanchy (University of London)
Peter Gumbert (Universiteit Leiden) †
Mayke de Jong (Universiteit Utrecht)
Rosamond McKitterick (University of Cambridge)
Arpád Orbán (Universiteit Utrecht)
Armando Petrucci (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
Richard H. Rouse (UCLA)
RULING THE SCRIPT
IN THE MIDDLE AGES

FORMAL ASPECTS OF

WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
(BOOKS, CHARTERS,
R
AND INSC IPTIONS)
Edited by
Sébastien Barret, Dominique Stutzmann,
and Georg Vogeler
H
H
F
F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
© 2016 – Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2016/0095/251
ISBN 978-2-503-56743-3
e-ISBN 978-2-503-56744-0
DOI: 10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.109651
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction
SÉBASTIEN BARRET, DOMINIQUE STUTZMANN,
and GEORG VOGELER 1
“Et hec scripsi manu mea propria”: Known and Unknown Autographs
of Charles IV as Testimonies of Intellectual Profile, Royal Literacy,
and Cultural Transfer
MARTIN BAUCH 25
The ‘Empire of Letters’: Textualis and Cursiva in Pragmatic Manuscripts
of Seville Cathedral, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries
DIEGO BELMONTE FERNÁNDEZ 49
Official Rules of Writing in the North of France? The Writing of Notarial
Documents in Normandy between Practices and Regulations
ISABELLE BRETTHAUER 75
The Practice of Writing in Regensburg: An Overview of the Ninth and
Tenth Centuries
CLAIRE DE CAZANOVE 95
Structure et style: observations paléographiques pour l’étude des
écritures cursives à Florence aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles
IRENE CECCHERINI 109
Revealing Some Structures and Rules of Book Production
(France, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries)
ÉMILIE COTTEREAU-GABILLET 131
Structures of (Mutual) Inspiration: Some Observations on the
Circulation of Repetitive Text Formulas in Charters from the
Medieval Low Countries (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries)
ELS DE PAERMENTIER 167
vi Contents
The Writing of Obedientiary Account Rolls at Norwich Cathedral
Priory (1256-1344)
HARMONY DEWEZ 197
Charte de fondation et date de dédicace: témoignages narratifs et
diplomatiques à l’abbaye Saint-Étienne de Caen
TAMIKO FOURNIER-FUJIMOTO 227
Masters of Micrography: Examples of Medieval Ashkenazi
Scribal Artists
RAHEL FRONDA 255
Writing Angles: Palaeographic Considerations on the Inclinaison
of the Script
MARIA GURRADO 283
Les actes épiscopaux en Bretagne aux XIe et XIIe siècles: une arme
pour la réforme?
CYPRIEN HENRY 299
Königsfelden Abbey and its First Cartulary: Dealing with Charters
in the Fourteenth Century
TOBIAS HODEL 331
The Use of the Vernacular and its Graphic and Material Shape in the
Epigraphic Discourse: Three Case Studies from Western France
ESTELLE INGRAND-VARENNE 357
The Shape of the Letters and the Dynamics of Composition in
Syriac Manuscripts (Fifth-Tenth Century)
AYDA KAPLAN 379
The Parchments of Marmoutier Abbey: Preparation, Shaping, Practices
(Mid-Eleventh to Mid-Twelfth Century)
CLAIRE LAMY 399
Scribal Activity and Diplomatic Forms in Western Provence
(c. 950-c. 1010)
JEAN-BAPTISTE RENAULT 427
Hand Spotting: The Registers of the Chancery of the Counts of Holland,
1316-1337
JINNA SMIT 477
Rule and Variation in Eleventh-Century English Minuscule
PETER STOKES 489
Princely Communication in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth
Century: A Diplomatic Study of the Charters of the Counts of Hainaut
VALERIA VAN CAMP 509
List of Shelfmarks 539
Preface
SÉBASTIEN BARRET, DOMINIQUE STUTZMANN,
and GEORG VOGELER
his book is dedicated to the study of medieval texts and their materiality
T
in their classic stages, i.e. production, use, and conservation. The pro-
duction of this book was made possible by several people and institu-
tions. APICES (Association Paléographique Internationale – Culture, Écriture,
Société), the research network GDR 3177 (Groupement de recherche ‘Diploma-
tique’) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the
French National Research Agency (ANR ORIFLAMMS – Ontology Research,
Image Features, Letterform Analysis on Multilingual Medieval Scripts, Agence
nationale de la Recherche / Cap Digital, ANR-12-CORP-0010), and the Institut
de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (CNRS) supported Paul Bertrand and us
financially and organisationally in organising a total of 18 sessions and gather-
ing more than 50 researchers from 9 countries at the International Medieval
Congress in Leeds between 2010 and 2014. The papers and discussions held in
this large-scale seminar are at the core of this volume, in which a selection of
the papers is published. Marco Mostert offered us the privilege of a publication
in Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, and Paul Bertrand kindly proposed us
to publish the papers from the five sessions that he had organised with Sébas-
tien Barret in 2010 and 2011 under the titles ‘From De re diplomatica to Liter-
acy’, ‘Between Narrative and Diplomatic Documents’, and ‘Mabillon’s Heirs’.
The six sessions organised in 2012 by Dominique Stutzmann and Georg Vo-
geler gave this volume its main title, Ruling the Script, and its focus on norms
and methodological underpinnings. The five sessions on ‘Digital Pleasures’
organised in 2013 by Sébastien Barret and Dominique Stutzmann account for
viii Preface
the great joy we now have to publish this volume, while the two sessions on the
‘Empire of Letters’ of 2014 (organised by Dominique Stutzmann and Vincent
Debiais) explain that we hope to reunite separate fields and disciplines.
We are grateful to all the presenters at the sessions and authors of the pa-
pers that they shared our interest, and allowed us to create an inspiring atmo-
sphere at the conference and continued in the spirit of the meetings in their
written texts. We subjected the papers to a thorough review process in which
we involved anonymous peers to ensure the academic quality of the texts, for
which we thank all the – still anonymous – reviewers. A review process takes
its time, the reviewers took the task seriously, and all authors integrated the
suggestions for improvement in an open-minded way. We think the result has
been worth the patience of all concerned. Robin Sutherland-Harris was deeply
involved in the proofreading of some English papers. APICES gave us once
again its financial support for the production of the volume, and we could not
have brought it to its conclusion without the infrastructure offered by the Insti-
tut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes. Brepols Publishers supported us
during the final editorial process. As for the using and keeping of this text in its
finally materialised form: that is now up to you, dear reader.
Introduction
SÉBASTIEN BARRET, DOMINIQUE STUTZMANN,
and GEORG VOGELER
he twenty papers in this volume take place in the lively field of studies
T
on ‘written communication in the Middle Ages’. They share a specific
orientation, in that they grant considerable significance to the material
and graphical aspects of communication strategies and explore how the pro-
ducer and sender anticipate the reception of both messenger and message. This
specific approach partly result from the combination of two separate threads of
historiography. Literacy and communication studies share many of their re-
search topics and methods with the so-called auxiliary sciences. Conversely,
the approaches of the auxiliary sciences can nourish communication studies. In
particular, palaeography in the broader sense of the term, and diplomatics,
understood as scholarship on every aspect of written documentation, polarise
studies on cultures, writing and societies.
As Marco Mostert states in his introduction to the Bibliography of Works
on Medieval Communication,1 it is anything but easy to delimit the scholarly
1 M. MOSTERT, A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication (Turnhout, 2012:
Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 2).
......................................................................................................................................
Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages: Formal Aspects of Written Communication (Books,
Charters, and Inscriptions), ed. S. BARRET, D. STUTZMANN, and G. VOGELER, Utrecht Studies
in Medieval Literacy, 35 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 1-24.
DOI 10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.112428
2 Introduction
field covered by ‘medieval communication’, since it intersects with the domain
of ‘auxiliary sciences’, but cannot be reduced to or substituted by them. Still,
in the last few yeas studies on communication have benefited tremendously
from the expansion of the sources and methods of auxiliary sciences. Among
the five new research directions pointed out by Mostert, the reader finds not
only research on archaeological artefacts, on iconographical sources, and the
rediscovery of orality in written sources, but also changes in the examination
of written sources. Thus, the philology of the textus receptus, as well as palae-
ography and codicology, provide historical information on ‘psychological
changes’ and belong to new historical approaches.2 These new approaches are
also a major factor in requalifying the very notion of ‘literacy’ and distinguish-
ing between several levels in its study, in order to address such problems as
multilingualism or the historical differences in the geographical or social dis-
semination of writing as a cultural technique.3
The dividing line between communication studies and auxiliary sciences
is without any doubt difficult to draw. Bibliographies tend to separate the
wheat (studies reflecting on communication and its modi) from the chaff (de-
scriptions of communication tools associated with ‘auxiliary sciences’); yet it
seems evident that the latter as well as the former provide insights into how
communication worked. In this volume we have gathered contributions which
cross the shadowy border line between communication studies and auxiliary
sciences, as they all shed a particular light on the medieval civilisation of the
written word and on how individual scribal mechanisms operate within a soci-
ety, and thus give insight into the rules within this society and cultural environ-
ment.
From Methodology in Auxiliary Sciences to History of Communication
The relationship between writing and communication provides the frame-
work in which the contributions to this volume can be read. They share an
understanding of the written relics from the past, considering them as part of
medieval communication culture and not simply as accidental forms for the
2 Ibid., p. 24.
3 M. MOSTERT, “Introduction”, in: Les échanges culturels au Moyen Âge: XXXIIe Congrès
de la SHMESP, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, juin 2001, ed. P. BOUCHERON (Paris, 2002),
pp. 9-21.