Sacred Words

This chapter explores a further component of the network of texts in the corpus of charters, how the habits of the clergy revolved around Scripture, canon law, and monastic rules. Clerical scribes understood and expressed gift through the terms of their imagined community of Scripture, but as they had heard it, meditated on it, and prayed with it. They bounded Church patrimonies too by the compass of their textual community of canon law, or their working idea of what that meant, as often as not unbounded to the text. Monastic rules similarly were a source for their identity, but in the fact of a rule rather than any particularities, the idea of a text as guide for devotion. And as clerical scribes wrote charters for others, they impressed on them something of this mentality: most citations need not have involved any first-hand contact with the Bible, canon law, or monastic rules by the writer, as liturgy, memory, other charters would have sufficed. But there was a constant awareness of the texts behind the text, of being Scripturally, canonically, regularly. Clerical scribes emerged from houses which defined themselves by contracts, and the documentary world which they enabled defined itself by texts.

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