Text and Textuality in Early Medieval Iberia
The Written andThe World,711–1031
GRAHAM BARRETT
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SimonBarton (1962–2017)
MarkWhittow (1957–2017)
PeterLinehan (1943–2020)
At last came the end of Don Quixote, after he had received all the sacraments and execrated the books of chivalry with manifold and convincing arguments. The scribe was present there, and said that he had never read in any book of chivalry that any knight-errant had died in his bed so serenely and in so Christian a manner as Don Quixote: and he, with the sympathies and tears of those who looked on, gave out his spirit – that is to say, he died. And when the priest saw this, he asked of the scribe to prepare for him a written record of how the good Alonso Quixano, commonly called Don Quixote de La Mancha, had departed from this life, and died of natural causes; and he was asking for this testimony lest any author, other than Cide Hamete Benengeli, should falsely raise him from the dead and make endless accounts of his exploits.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, DonQuixotedeLaMancha, II.74
Preface
This book has been a while in the making, and remains in many ways unsatisfactory. I have always found it easier to define what it is not than what it is: while its focus is the Latin charters of the kingdoms of Asturias-León and Navarra in the early Middle Ages, it is neither a palaeographic nor a diplomatic nor a linguistic study of material normally treated in one of those terms, and my approach is neither legal nor institutional nor social nor cultural, at least in the strict sense of those traditions. I have instead attempted something at once simpler and more difficult, but which has seemed to me the precondition for all such enquiries of a higher order. This is a sociocultural study of the interface between the written and the world: my aim is to trace the lifecycle of the charters and the network of texts in which they were embedded as a step towards finding their place in the society and culture which we use them to describe. I hope to convey some sense of not the literacy but the textuality of early medieval Iberia, its inscription in writing, and thereby provide a point of departure for its historical study. Preparing such a study has at times felt like a Sisyphean labour. The charters which I have assembled into a database are divided up amongst many archives in Spain and Portugal; visiting each of them in turn, or where impractical scanning digital images kindly supplied by understanding archivists instead, has been the work of a decade. Ironically, tracking down the printed editions in which they are published has been no easier an undertaking, and remains a chimeric dream. Certain of these publications have such an exiguous presence in libraries that consulting them conveys something of the experience of samizdat literature. There is no one critical introduction to the whole corpus and few translations to provide any
apprenticeship in often difficult texts, access to archival material varies widely, not always explicably, editions differ in date, quality, and coverage by region and from archive to archive, and some charters still await cataloguing, let alone publication. My hope here is not only to lay groundwork for a new way of reading the documentation of early medieval Iberia, but also to lower the bar to entry as best I can for students and scholars approaching this material for the first time.
Some explanatory notes are in order for what follows. The foundation of this book is a survey of all, or very nearly all, the charters of early medieval Iberia, excluding Catalunya for the sake of manageability, and I should say up front that I employ the term ‘Iberia’ with that limited compass. In the main body I provide illustrative extracts from the texts themselves as often as possible, and as an aid to comprehension I have paraphrased each one in parentheses rather than translating directly, because (for me at least) the Latin tends often to elude precise rendering into English. In the footnotes, I cite a representative range of charters for each of my points, rather than all possible examples, simply because this would make a book which is long as is unending. It is also partly a control, as I am bound to have misinterpreted some of the charters, or missed new scholarship.
There are a number of systems of abbreviation in use for the major collections in the corpus, but I have devised my own in an attempt to offer an immediately recognisable sign for each archive as a guide to the reader. Where this short form is followed by a comma, it refers to introductory material from that edition; without a comma, it designates a document or series of documents. For the sake of economy, I employ these abbreviations to refer to the charter in its physical as well as its edited form, but in the cases where I discuss script, layout, or other material aspects of presentation in detail I have provided full archival referencing in the list of figures. For the same reason, all citations of literature are in the shortest form possible, author surname and distinguishing noun from the title, and the full entry can be consulted in the bibliography.
For the sake of clarity rather than literary elegance, I have quoted the New International Version for all verses of Scripture, and the corresponding numbering (applicable to the Psalms). On the problem of proper names, in the end I have employed the modernised Spanish or Portuguese equivalent wherever there is a sizeable historiography. For all other names, including unidentified places, I use that in the document, though even this approach is bound to be inconsistent, since they are often spelled multiply within a text, leaving the nominative case, if there was one, unfathomable. Handling such a large corpus of material inevitably poses a problem of how to present it manageably. To escape as best I can the Scylla of generalising anecdote and the Charybdis of plodding exhaustiveness, I have distilled the charters into tables and charts illustrating the main aspects which I then treat in detail. The tables are explained in the course of discussion, but the charts call for a brief introduction here. As historians we are in the business of change over time, but the charters are distributed unevenly from year to year, so to say that there is a greater number of examples of some phenomenon in one year than in another risks reflecting this distribution back at the reader without understanding what lies behind the trend. In other words, if the total number of lay charters, for instance, increases over time, this may only be the product of the total number of charters rising at that rate, rather than any social or cultural change in documentary practice. By way of correction, all graphic representations of the data in this book are given not in absolute numbers but as proportions of all charters surviving for a given year. The other distorting factor when dealing with documentation is forgery, and so each chart has three lines to convey full context. The thin solid line denotes the rate per year for genuine charters only, the thin dashed line includes false charters, and the thick solid line indicates a five-year moving average based on the annual rate for authentic charters. For clarity, however, the more complex charts comparing multiple trends show the moving average alone.
In many ways this book is the product of the effort of others; certainly my own share in it is the result of the immeasurable support which I have enjoyed over the long years of its gestation. I owe my start in the field to the inspiration of Nick Everett and Mark Meyerson in Toronto, but it was Chris Wickham who guided me through my doctorate at Oxford with his unflagging encouragement and boundless wisdom, and I had the great good fortune to benefit from the generous criticism of Wendy Davies and the late Simon Barton as thesis examiners.
In helping me to bring that initial effort to publication, I must thank my colleagues at Balliol College and St John’s College, Oxford, the Institute of Historical Research, London, and the University of Lincoln, as well as the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the British Library, London, the Archivo Catedralicio de León, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Madrid, and the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Lisbon. Of the many colleagues and collaborators whom I have been privileged to rely upon while writing this book, I wish particularly to thank Julio Escalona Monge and Eduardo Manzano Moreno for their welcome to Spain and their countless acts of kindness since then, as well as Álvaro Carvajal Castro, Ainoa Castro Correa, André Evangelista Marques, David Peterson, José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo, Jamie Wood, and Roger Wright for much stimulating discussion and comradeship. Above and beyond the call of duty, Roger Collins read through the final manuscript with patience and surpassing acumen. As stout yeomen of soundness, my friends Oren Margolis, Robert Portass, Matthew Walker, and George Woudhuysen have sustained me in all things, and I am truly blessed by my parents David Barrett and Virginia Robeson, my sister Meredith, and the gift of Emma Cayley, my partner. Now and ever, they have all my gratitude, and all my love. This book is dedicated to the memory of three dearly departed mentors—Simon Barton, Mark Whittow, and Peter Linehan whose friendship and counsel I miss no less for the passage of time.
February 2022
ListofFigures
Table of Contents
Introduction: Literacy as Textuality
The Case Study
PART I THE LIFECYCLE
Archival Voices
The Corpus
Centre: Asturias
Cantabria
León
West: Galicia
Portugal
East: Aragón
Castilla
La Rioja Navarra
Transmission
Chronology
Actors
Actions
Textual Memories
Creating Agents
Scribes
Employers
Methods
Processes
Presentations
Contexts
Affirmations
Settings
Communities
Individuals
Audible Texts
Retaining
Extension
Confirmation
Augmentation
Preservation
Consolidation
Organisation
Portable Texts
PART II THE NETWORK
Proving Reference
Documenting
Emphasising
Evidence
Parchmentwork
Litigation
Integration
Manipulation
Textual Mentalities
Framing
Rhetoric
6.
Legalities
Penalties
Practice
Families
Findings
Advantage
Treason
Adultery
Silence
Numbers
Customs
Practical Texts
Sacred Words
Scriptures
Inspiration
Malediction
Canons
Norms
Rules
Identities
Contracts
Malleable Texts
Conclusion: Imaginary Libraries
Two Questions
The Temple of Text
Appendices
Bibliography
Abbreviations:PrimarySources
PrimarySources
Abbreviations:SecondaryLiterature
SecondaryLiterature
List of Figures
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 2.1 2.2
Map: Major Archival Collections and Repositories for Early Medieval Iberia
Regional Groupings of Archives and Charters
Cartulary copy, reproducing monograms and confirmations: Celanova 72 (Tumbo de Celanova, Madrid, AHN, Códices, L.986, fol. 4r: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CODICES, L.986)
Palaeography
Palaeography (911–1031)
Diplomatic
Diplomatic (911–1031)
Region Region (911–1031)
Charters (711–910)
Charters (911–1031)
Personnel
Personnel (911–1031)
Typology
Typology (911–1031)
Complexity
Complexity (911–1031)
Witnesses to Rabal Charters
Original charter, autograph signatures: Sahagún 79 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Benito de Sahagún, carp. 873, no. 6: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.873,N.6)
Original charter, ‘signature hand’: Sahagún 96 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Benito de Sahagún, carp. 873, no. 10: Ministerio de Cultura y
Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.873,N.10)
Original charter, draft signatures: Sahagún 96 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Benito de Sahagún, carp. 873, no. 10, dorso: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.873,N.10)
Original charter, empty brackets: Eslonza 10 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Pedro de Eslonza, carp. 957, no. 13: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.957,N.13)
Named Scribes
Original charter, product of scribal collaboration: PMH254 (Lisbon, ANTT, Ordem de São Bento, Mosteiro de São João Baptista de Pendorada, mç. 1, no. 5 (PT/TT/MSJBP/004/0001): Imagem cedida pelo ANTT)
Bell tower and scriptorium of the monastery of San Salvador de Tábara (Beato de Tábara, Madrid, AHN, Códices, L.1097, fol. 171v: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CODICES,L.1097)
Named Scribes (911–1031)
Scribal Careers (911–1031)
Regnal Dating
Regnal Dating (911–1031)
Original charter, preparatory scribal notes: Eslonza 26 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Pedro de Eslonza, carp. 958, no. 9, dorso: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.958,N.9)
Original charter, prepared template, blank price: PMH175 (Lisbon, ANTT, Ordem de São Bento, Mosteiro de São João Baptista de Pendorada, mç. 1, no. 2 (PT/TT/MSJBP/004/0001/02): Imagem cedida pelo ANTT)
Original charter, formatted for display: Sahagún 6 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Benito de Sahagún, carp. 872, no. 6: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.872,N.6)
Original charter, main text distinct from witness section: PMH41 (Lisbon, ANTT, Cónegos Regulares de Santo Agostinho, Mosteiro do Salvador de Moreira, mç. 1, no. 5 (PT/TT/MSM/A/M01): Imagem cedida pelo ANTT)
Original charter, formatted for reading: Sahagún 148 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Benito de Sahagún, carp. 874, no. 5: Ministerio de
Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.874,N.5)
Original charters, two documents written on one parchment: León 519, 523 (León, Archivo Catedralicio, Pergaminos, no. 146A–B)
Original ‘miniature archive’, single scribe: León 864, 866–8, 870 (León, Archivo Catedralicio, Pergaminos, nos 152–153A–E)
Original ‘miniature archive’, multiple scribes: León 457–9, 465, 467, 471–2 (León, Archivo Catedralicio, Pergaminos, no. 7255)
Original charter, retrospective archive: Sahagún 233–6 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Benito de Sahagún, carp. 875, no. 13: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.875,N.13)
Sworn Charters (911–1031)
Royal Movements
Map: Royal Movements
Reading Charters (911–1031)
Notices of Confirmation
Notices of Confirmation (911–1031)
Original charter, posterior notices of confirmation: León 280 (León, Archivo Catedralicio, Pergaminos, no. 892)
Charters of Confirmation
Charters of Confirmation (911–1031)
Dorsal Notes
Dorsal Notes (911–1031)
Original charter, folded with archival notes: PMH250 (Lisbon, ANTT, Ordem de São Bento, Mosteiro de São João Baptista de Pendorada, mç. 1, no. 4 (PT/TT/MSJBP/004/0001), dorso: Imagem cedida pelo ANTT)
Charters Citing Charters
Charters Citing Charters (911–1031)
Charters Citing Law
Charters Citing Law (911–1031)
Charters Citing Law versus Charters by Career Scribes (911–1031)
Laws Cited in Charters
5.5
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
6.9
C.1
C.2
C.3
C.4
C.5
Treason Law in Practice
Charters Citing Scripture
Charters Citing Scripture (911–1031)
Charters Citing Canons
Charters Citing Canons (911–1031)
Charters Citing Rules
Charters Citing Rules (911–1031)
Monastic Rules (911–1031)
Scripture Cited in Charters
Canonical Citations
Charters Citing Texts
Charters Citing Texts (911–1031)
Charters Mentioning Books
Charters Mentioning Books (911–1031)
Charter copy of Visigothic laws: Eslonza 24 (Madrid, AHN, Sección Clero, Regular, San Pedro de Eslonza, carp. 958, no. 7, dorso: Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Archivo Histórico Nacional. CLEROSECULAR REGULAR,Car.958,N.7)
C.6
John receives the Scroll and measures the Temple (Morgan Beatus, New York, NY, Morgan Library, MS M.644, fol. 146r: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York)
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
Appendix 5
Appendix 6
Appendix 7
List of Regnal Dates
Astorga: Concordance of Charters and Corrected Dates
Celanova: Concordance of Charters and Corrected Dates
Lugo: Concordance of Editions and Dates of Charters
Portugal: Concordance of Editions and Dates of Charters
Career Scribes (5+ Charters)
Institutional and Individual (Ecclesiastical and Lay) Archives
Introduction
Literacy as Textuality
The study of literacy should justify itself. What relation does the written record of the past have to the world which it seems to describe for us? Why was it made, and why does it survive? This is, or should be, the study of literacy: asking our sources the question of their own existence, and investigating how texts—and text itself— mattered. The challenge is that it can so easily become a simple survey, a catalogue of everything set down in writing, rather than a critical examination of what was written when, by and for whom, and why. Maybe a new word is needed to capture this orientation: in ordinary usage ‘literacy’ is the antithesis of ‘illiteracy’, but it can range well beyond the ability to read and write, to denote a familiarity with certain skills or knowledge. Recognising this by speaking of ‘literacies’ only draws out the point, that the term is an empty vessel, to be filled with cultural priorities of the moment and used to measure their attainment in society, whether past or present.1 For as long as there have been Middle Ages, the question of literacy has been asked by the standards of Antiquity and the Renaissance, but reluctance to query the question itself has directed the search for an answer towards description and evaluation by those terms, away from definition and analysis within the sociocultural framework of the period. This keeps us in the business of measuring surface phenomena, the survival of Classical literary culture and education. What we need is a more basic enquiry, to map out the foundations. Before we can securely make use of what text we have, we must find its home in the society which produced
it: the ‘textuality’ of that society is an index of the intersection and interaction of the written with the world.
Until recently there was little argument that medieval literacy should be understood as continuity with one aspect of the ancient world. What gauged it was the relative degree not of the ability to read and write, but of the cultivation of the Classics, especially by the laity. At the end of this grand tradition stands the work of Pierre Riché, delineating the decline of the urban schools of grammar and rhetoric which provided the foundation for educated culture in secular Roman society, and the subsequent rise of the monastic scholawhich retained solely those aspects of the Classical curriculum useful for studying Scripture, and confined itself to teaching the clergy and to a lesser extent a court élite. Change came through dichotomy: by the eighth century Romanitas had yielded to Germanitas and ‘written civilisation had been destroyed’, admittedly surviving in debased form in the monasteries but hardly meriting the name.2 The problem here is not one of method or results; there is no point pretending that the early Middle Ages rivalled the late Republic in literary glories. The partiality of such studies is their limiting factor, the identification of literacy with one special literature. For how else to explain the economic determinism which lies behind them? Henri Pirenne had argued that bureaucratic administration by literate laymen survived the barbarian invasions, yet once the rise of Islam had ‘closed the Mediterranean’, bringing about the disappearance of commerce and cities, the schools which underpinned this system followed. In the Carolingian world, the clergy monopolised learning and provided such managerial skills as were needed, while the laity remained illiterate.3 This has become a universal iron law: absent commercial and urban dynamism, clergy and laity must represent literacy and orality respectively.4 But it is based on a limited case, in that Roman literacy, the gift of the grammarian, was both contingent on the demands of bureaucracy and served to provide the imperial élite with a shared identity, privileged because difficult to obtain without an expensive education.5 In other words, it is a particular construction of literacy
for a specific context. Should we still be thinking with the fall of Rome? Did the heirs to Rome need the same cultural tools? Did urban schools, or any schools, have a role in their literacy? Did cities or citizens? Did politics or commerce?6
How one answers these questions depends in large part on the type of evidence which one studies, and the major change came with a turn from literature to documentation. At the beginning of this new tradition stands the work of Michael Clanchy, who traced in an instant classic of historiography how the Norman kings of England secured their conquered realm through bureaucratic government, driving a greater and more general use of written records and as a by-product promoting trust in them. Oral and tactile modes— dictation, reading out loud, documentary seals—offered means by which the illiterate could participate indirectly but effectively in writing, such that personal literacy mattered less than willingness to engage with the written word. Over time, this combination of trust and access resulted in a shift from reliance on memory to documentation as the primary form of legal evidence.7 As a case study it is revolutionary, but even more significant is the approach: literacy defined not by Classics, but by working outwards from its manifestations to motivations and meanings, subordinating the question of how much to those of what and why. Yet rather than that former tradition, the prompt came from another iron law, the technological determinism which attributed the creation of a reading public to the agency of the printing press.8 The result is an unduly schematic contrast between the ‘new literacy’ of a vindicated high Middle Ages, where government reached all citizens, and the ‘old literacy’ guarded jealously by a religious caste. With some new actors, the model remains dichotomous, an early medieval clergy who restricted literacy versus the Norman state which generalised it by routinising authority through bureaucracy.9
For the centuries between the Romans and Normans, one obstacle remained the Latin language itself, assumed to be unintelligible to the lay vernaculars. But this presumption of illiteracy has been undermined by the seminal work of Roger Wright, who has
argued for a broad variation amongst evolving spoken Romance dialects allied to a single conservative written standard, not unlike the continuum holding together the spoken and written registers of modern English, French, or Arabic. If Latin was the written vernacular of early medieval western Europe, texts were comprehensible when read aloud; only with archaising reforms to orthography and pronunciation by the Carolingians did writing and speaking begin to diverge in regions under their immediate influence.10 Wholesale reappraisal of the early Middle Ages beckoned, and the first to take the lead was Rosamond McKitterick, making the case that the written word was not limited to an ecclesiastical élite, but part of everyday life for the laity in the Carolingian world, even in its eastern Germanic lands where bilingualism was the norm. Government exploited documentation in administration, witnessed by a tremendous growth in the number of charters and manuscripts during the period and the many well-worn legal codices which survive; legislation cannot have been merely minutes of oral pronouncements recorded by clerics for internal use or symbols of the Roman legislative tradition. Inevitably for this field the focus came to rest on vindicating the efficacy of the state and the vitality of court culture, but the key finding is that the clergy promoted rather than constrained a wider use of texts. Charters from St Gall reveal how the monastery provided scribes for transactions taking place in its environs, and in turn how members of the laity who were not themselves literate nonetheless found it necessary to make complex social and logistical arrangements to facilitate engaging in written modes of business.11 There was a bias for, rather than against, literacy in the early medieval period, and we should approach it with the same.
Over the past 30 years there has been a comprehensive reassessment of literacy in the early Middle Ages.12 From the work of successive generations of scholars ready to recast the era more positively, we have learned that literacy, both literary and documentary, was less confined to cities and clerics than previously supposed, while formal distinctions drawn from legal history such as
dispositive versus probative mattered less in practice. Where there was no strong pre-existing habit of recourse to text, procedures developed over time to enable and encourage use of written records by the laity; they never displaced oral forms of transaction, but instead were complementary, and equally important.13 The need to understand how Latin could be more than an obstacle to comprehension has become apparent, and we can see how it stimulated vernacular literacy including in zones which had been marginal to the Roman world such as Ireland.14 For periods which have traditionally been written down (or off), an overdue stocktaking of what survives and what is lost has forced a re-evaluation: even the Lombards, ‘quintessential barbarians’, have been cleared of blame for terminating lay literacy in Italy, by moving beyond tabulating signatures on charters to assessing the wider utility of written law for participants in court cases, whatever their personal abilities, and the enduring epigraphic habit as a written means of self-promotion.15 Once historians lowered their sights from Classics to charters, the mirage of an illiterate early medieval laity was bound to clear. But where do we go from here? Cataloguing uses and users of the written word has served its purpose, and anyone who now predicates a thesis on absence of evidence which may yet be discovered or reassessed does so at some risk.16 The problem is that difficulty of transcending description, which can demonstrate little beyond presence or absence, rise or fall, however the quarry is redefined. And how can we be certain that what we have compiled is more than anecdotal? What if our conclusions are merely a shorthand for what has been preserved?
The field is at something of an impasse because it has resisted articulating a purpose for itself which is not in some sense an index of culture. Scholarship is expansive on survey but reticent when it comes to the fundamental question of why, tending to imply correlation between dynamic government and prevalent literacy, though shying away from the logical inverse; the Carolingians are the Normans of the early Middle Ages, other dynasties lesser imitations.17 Yet when Simon Franklin looked at the high medieval
birchbark letters from Novgorod, he found routine and casual literacy, scarcely the preserve of a mandarin class, more at home amidst the diversity of informal writing in the Roman world. No developed state or administration engendered this, though the environment was urban: instead, use of the written word seems simply to have been a personal choice.18 The question remains open for discussion. One way forward has been offered by Gerd Althoff, who argued that ritual, governed by Spielregeln or ‘rules of the game’, stood in for an absence of literate capacities in Ottonian society, and urged the study of ceremony and gesture in their place.19 Taking the cue, Marco Mostert has directed the invaluable Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy in quest of the ‘relative importance’ of literacy amongst other forms of communication.20 Published volumes, however, have largely resisted ‘attempts at rehabilitating early medieval pragmatic literacy’: some inventory documentation, others trace the passage ‘from memory to written record’ across later medieval Europe under the influence of state formation, urbanisation, or trade.21 There have been fascinating explorations of the entanglement of orality and literacy, but arguments that writing, speech, and ritual were ‘equally valid’ tools spark minimal joy.22 Even redefined as a communicative mode, the study of literacy can so easily slip into listing literature, counting enough of the chosen cultural products to endorse a period or place. As with the renaissances being discovered in the most unpromising environments, if literacy is any writing and any writing proves literacy, what can we do with what we are doing?23
Like the rise of Late Antiquity in the historiography, the ‘literacy industry’ finds its mark everywhere, and is contented. We naturally want our own patch of history to be highly literate, because that means complexity and sophistication.24 The mid-twentieth century saw an extraordinary debate about the ‘consequences of literacy’, which Jack Goody identified as the cognitive ability to distinguish past from present: Greece gave birth to logical analysis because this is predicated on widespread personal alphabetic literacy, while in those literate societies where it failed to emerge some active
restriction such as a complex script or ‘caste literacy’ is invariably to blame.25 The object was neutral premises for the ‘rise of the West’, but ‘technologies of the intellect’ leave little manoeuvring room for the historian; if the stated consequences seem absent, one simply identifies the limiting factor. In the Middle Ages, the subordination of literacy to religious tradition restricted the Classical golden age of a literate laity, but when it was reborn in later medieval England, all the major historical innovations in administration, the economy, and religion were ‘recapitulated’, going through the motions of literacy and its further consequences.26 The technological determinism now comes across as naïve, and was driven by developments in communications media presaging the computing revolution.27 Walter Ong pronounced ‘interiorised’ literacy to be ‘absolutely necessary’ for human consciousness to reach its ‘fuller potentials’, and coined the term ‘residual orality’ to describe transitional societies such as the Middle Ages in which writing took place in an oral psychological setting, memorised and recycled back into a world of speech.28 Yet behind the pseudo-science is the familiar, inescapable association of literacy with development.
The assumption underlying ‘consequences’ is that literacy plays a fixed, independent role in society. Scholars have in the past made much of mixed idioms like ‘the Bible says’, or the survival of oral formulaic poetry, or persistent reliance on memory, as indices of relative literacy in medieval Europe, as if conventions of speech and cultural practices can be mapped straightforwardly onto cognitive states.29 Insofar as these have been explored by experiment, however, any observable mental change is a function not of literacy itself, but of the specific form of schooling in it: agency lies with the uses made of the technology, rather than with the technology itself.30 We might formulate these as ‘autonomous’ and ‘ideological’ models; any given tool offers constraints and opportunities, but how they are dealt with is the business of social organisation, and technology, far from neutral, is the product of human actions, social and cultural processes which shape its forms and functions.31 If the nature of a medium acts to structure its surroundings through the
arrangements put in place to use it, the ‘message’ of the written word becomes the means of its usage, rather than any signifier of development.32 How did medieval society use the written word? The consequences follow from the how, not from the written word; its historical study is an enquiry into sociocultural organisation. When literacy is looked at in this way, orality and memory are components of the measures which enabled its employment. One need not agree with Michael Richter that writing in the early Middle Ages was nothing but an artificial clerical gloss on a world of speech to recognise a valuable warning against assuming the accessibility or representativeness of text.33
No one can seriously argue that a majority, or even a sizeable minority, could read and write in the period. Beyond reading and writing, social memory provided the means to retain information and commemorate the past, but when we explore how it functioned as a counterpart to text, we realise that both recalling and speaking were in constant contact with reading and writing, and mutually influential.34 If oral and literate modes complemented each other, the question becomes how they were integrated—through what intermediary actors in possession of the necessary skills, through what processes of dialogue—rather than which of them mattered more. The most illuminating recent studies have consequently been those not focussed on literacy as such, but on the situation of literacy, or textuality: which seek a home for the written word in specific contexts of use, such as the settlement of disputes, the control and management of land, gift-giving and the creation of relationships, or the continuous but changing archival practices of the laity. Whereas the predominance of ecclesiastical estates in the documentary record has customarily been taken to reflect a clerical monopoly of literacy, and the use of oral procedures in court cases as proof of the decline of lay literacy, the work of the ‘Bucknell Group’ especially has elucidated how written evidence nonetheless played a key role for all parties in defending ownership and resolving differences, as it had in the late Roman world.35 Wherever we encounter argument we find documentation introduced by oral and
ritual processes, read aloud, sworn on oath, often proving decisive. The old opposition of laity and clergy has come in for a rethink, in a world before the Gregorian Reform where the interests and actions of both were entangled in the affairs of a proprietary Church.36
What remains is to move from the particular to the general, to think through what role literacy played in a whole society, and how that society shaped itself to it. Yet before we do so, we need to step back and decentre the actual, physical presence of text from the study of its usage. One of the most fruitful insights into medieval literacy is the model of the ‘textual community’, first formulated by Brian Stock to describe certain heretical movements in the later Middle Ages. This refers to groups whose thoughts and actions were founded on their reading of a particular set of texts or, absent the texts themselves, the guidance of a ‘literate interpreter’ who enabled the group to internalise them.37 Supposedly this social configuration could not have existed in earlier centuries because of lesser literacy, but the evidence given for that is the probative rather than dispositive role of charters; if a text need not be involved, at least first-hand, surely what must matter is whether the written word can be demonstrated to have been accepted into the framework for social behaviour, and how it then operated in practice.38 More simply, the ‘textual community’ is a model for the integration of literacy and orality. The written word was communicated and disseminated via speech, whatever the type of text; medieval writing often had public recital as well as private reading in mind.39 Once we grant the coexistence of primary and secondary or first-hand and second-hand literacy, a text can be accessed not only by a literate but also by an illiterate through a literate: assessing who ‘read’ what and how is crucial to understanding the full meaning of the written record.40 If text can serve to frame behaviour – ‘acting textually’ –regardless of immediate presence, channels to text become one part of the sociocultural study of literacy as textuality. This is not remotely intended as a comprehensive survey of a vast literature, merely to chart the idiosyncratic course of reading which has led to the present study.41 For the ‘textual community’ as stated
does not go far enough. The import of social memory is that a ‘literate interpreter’ need not personally have been literate to transmit an originally written code to a group: once the first transmission of the text took place, its content could be communicated amongst illiterates thereafter—spoken, internalised, recalled. Literacy can be tertiary in the sense that the rules of a text can be operative at several removes from the text itself, even if the literal content of that text has been attenuated over the course of its dissemination. How many actions in modern life are governed by our vague sense of what is provided or required by some written law? Can we even be sure why we think so? Yet how can we truly assess the significance of the written word without taking this full reach into account? One step in the right direction is to let go of the singularity of text. The linguistic turn in philosophy gave us the term ‘intertextuality’ to describe the state of each text being a product of other texts, a transposition of their systems of signs into one of its own. The reader is the space where all references to other texts which constitute a given text are interpreted; whatever the authorial intention, the reader constructs the meaning of a text by recognising and acknowledging a combination of codes residing within its intertextuality.42 The point in plain English is that we shall still miss the full scope of literacy even if we extend our horizon to the written word in primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of access and use. What other texts gave each text its total meaning—and how? Texts circulated not only in copies, and through reading aloud, and by retention in memory, but also as intertextualities: as quotations, citations, allusions, a network of texts contributing to the signification of each individual text. Only by identifying the sources involved and tracing the connections amongst them can we go beneath the surface to map the underlying written structure of society.
The Case Study
This essay in the study of textuality focusses on the Christian kingdoms of Asturias-León and Navarra, which I have chosen because of their rich but still underexploited source material. When Muslim invaders conquered the Visigothic kingdom in 711, the northern third or quarter of the Peninsula was left to go its own way, and soon became home to independent polities (see Appendix 1).43 Traditionally, simplistically, this began with the legendary battle of Covadonga (718/22), where freedom fighter ‘Don’ Pelayo confronted a punishment detail of ‘Moors’ despatched from al-Andalus in the south, and in victory took the first step in eight centuries of Reconquista, culminating in the reconquest of Granada in 1492.44 In reality, his kingdom of Asturias was a modest and local affair, safe in the fastness of the Cantabrian Mountains, and only came into its own under Alfonso II (791–842), who expanded west and south into Galicia and eastwards into the Basque Country. His successors, notably Alfonso III (866–910), made further inroads into Muslimheld as well as autonomous territory, and by the reign of Fruela II (924–25) the kingdom was based at León, below the mountains on the edge of the Meseta Central plateau and the Duero River basin. To the east, meanwhile, the county of Castilla was developing under intermittent royal oversight as a militarised frontier facing al-Andalus. Beginning with Fernán González (931/32–70), its counts began to be increasingly assertive in their independence, but for the moment they remained one more ambitious regional aristocracy amongst many.45 Farther east still, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Charlemagne had established a Carolingian presence from 778 which developed into the Catalan counties of the ‘Spanish March’, but amidst their struggles with al-Andalus, a Basque chieftain named Íñigo Arista came to power in Pamplona by the 820s. In the early tenth century, this kingdom of Navarra emerged fully from Muslim overlordship as the eastern counterpart to León.46
With military, political, and dynastic vicissitudes, the configuration remained broadly stable until the collapse of the Islamic caliphate based at Córdoba in 1031. This transformed the geopolitical situation fundamentally, fracturing al-Andalus into a constellation of taifa or
