Archival Voices

This chapter introduces the lifecycle of the corpus of charters: how early medieval birth gave way to centuries of changing hands, passage from archive to archive, until the only homes which have preserved them became ecclesiastical and state institutions. In defining the corpus for study, the chapter casts the widest possible net, ranging over the entirety of northern Iberia (excluding Catalunya), to control for particularities which can distort the overall picture and vagaries which can frustrate understanding an individual text. It surveys all surviving and published charters from 711 to 1031, outlining their geographical diffusion and archival history, their varying modes of textual transmission, their chronological distribution and how it maps onto what else we know of the period, and the range of actors and actions represented in the material. In concluding, the chapter considers the key question of why there is growth over time in the number of charters, and propose a ‘lateral diffusion’ model of literacy. Exposure to charters which conferred advantage on their users engendered adoption of documentary practice and stimulated the development of documentary habits in new quarters: if we apply this model to the contours of the corpus, the expansion of estates becomes the driver of documentation.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Documentary evidence · Documentation · Genealogy · Geography · Literacy · Period (music) · Political science · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia · History · Law · Medieval History and Crusades · Medieval Iberian Studies