Sealing Signs and the Art of Transcribing in the Vierzon Cartulary.

In the 1150s or 1160s, the Berrichon abbey of St-Pierre at Vierzon produced a manuscript collection of its official transactions. [1] Such collections, known as cartularies, are copies in codex form of individual acts, or charters, in the possession of a given authority, whether ecclesiastical or lay. Charters preserve agreements originally spoken between two parties, and they thus constitute a written record of donations, privileges, and other secular and ecclesiastical engagements. As a document both historical and legal, cartularies are a cherished research domain of historians and diplomaticists. The Cartulary of Vierzon, however, deserves close art historical examination, as it is one of very few such twelfth-century collections to have been embellished with elaborate illuminations. More than serving as simple illustrations of the text, this cartulary's illuminations--highly unusual in their imagery and even in their style--resist traditional iconographic interpretation. Even the images' relation to the legal texts is often unclear. The texts, after all, are a hodgepodge of legal protocols, invocations, oaths, and the like. The fact that these texts are infused with elements of orality and performance is perhaps a clue that the interpretation of the images, too, should rather tease out the fugitive, performative elements of diplomatic culture. The manuscript's production itself--the processes of transcribing and illuminating older charters--might have had a role in resuscitating these lost moments. It is this search for such lost, elusive moments that ultimately compels a critical reconsideration of the text-image dynamic for an important genre of illuminated text.

A handful of images punctuates the text of the Vierzon Cartulary. [2] After an initial illumination showing Saints Peter and Paul, images of Popes Calixtus II (fol. 1) and Hadrian IV (fol. lv) introduce their respective acts (Figs. 1, 2). A scene of Charles the Bald in conversation with Archbishop Rodolphus of Bourges (fol. 2v) and a figure of King Louis the Pious or the Stammerer (fol. 3v) confirm two royal charters. A half-page illustration (fol. 5v) depicts an act of conveyance, showing the nobleman Aimbrannus kneeling, extending a book-charter to Abbot Aimericus. After these high-ranking documents confer a privileged tone on the cartulary, the subsequent acts then report the local transactions of Vierzon's abbots. Some of these are accompanied by standing figures of the abbots themselves, who seem to introduce their acts. The first among these transactions are those of late ninth-century Abbot Sion (fol. 4, Fig. 3), followed by those issued by earlier ninth-century abbots. This brief disorder excepted, t he cartulary then presents Vierzon's transactions more or less in chronological succession. All told, the Vierzon Cartulary contains the texts of 116 charters stretching from the ninth century to the middle of the twelfth century, and through these acts one can trace the decisive events that marked the abbey's history. [3]

It is indeed one of the remarkable features of cartularies that their texts are often caught between history writing and simple transcription. To create a cartulary, the individual transactions were rewritten in a carefully arranged sequence, ordered, for example, according to the lands or donors involved. Some monasteries kept more than one cartulary, each one organized according to different criteria. The Vierzon manuscript is somewhat unusual in that the charters are grouped by abbacy. In this way, the Vierzon Cartulary resembles a gesta abbatum, a monastery's recording of each abbot's deeds. Through such commemoration of the abbots, the series of texts presents a cogent, sequential overview of the monastery's past. Unlike a gesta abbatum, however, Vierzon's history is told purely through the legal transactions, with neither any additional details of the monastery's activities nor other information on the abbots' lives or deeds. It simply retells the past as a patchwork of legal events. [4]

A related feature of cartularies is their often open-ended production. Religious establishments occasionally produced several cartularies over a period of decades or centuries, collecting first their earliest acts and later producing a second volume to update the bookkeeping. The Vierzon Cartulary, for instance, appears to be a midcentury copy of an earlier twelfth-century manuscript. Evidently a crisis--Pope Hadrian IV's annulment of an improper election in 1154--called for a fresh redaction by the new, justly elected Abbot Peter. Peter's new cartulary therefore places up front these most recent papal bulls that expose the fraudulent election and legitimize his own. [5] In some cartulary examples, the finished codex was provided with blank pages for adding acts that postdate the manuscript's completion. (The final folios of Vierzon's cartulary contain several undated charters written in a slightly later hand.) Still other cartularies left blank spaces between acts for the purpose of correcting, clarifying, or otherwise augmenting the text of the original agreement. A cartulary could thus present an open-ended text, writing a monastery's history as an ongoing succession of events.

In short, cartularies had the potential to tie together disjunctive elements and discontinuous events to craft a more or less fluid history. The Vierzon Cartulary's organization by abbacy of disparate donation texts works to this effect. The consistent mise-en-page and the script of a cartulary codex (about which more will be said below) impart an impression of historical continuity as well. Furthermore, any forged documents inserted in this history provide historical and chronological links where missing originals would leave intrusive gaps. [6] The act of rewriting the individual charters consequently assumed importance as an exercise of historical performance, fashioning the historical record. Transcribing was the occasion for scribal interpretation and interpolation, much as we have come to associate these acts with modern translation practice. [7] Certainly the task of transcribing Carolingian documents required a certain sense of translation on the part of the twelfth-century scribe, confronted with te xts of outdated legal protocols and a Latin not entirely like his own. The cartulary is thus really a stitching together of forgeries, translations, and transcriptions, all rectified and "codified" to meet contemporary custom and historical desire. [8]

The same could be argued for the images of an illustrated cartulary. The images (lacking from the original charters) teeter between invention, appropriation, and translation. Twelfth-century illuminators naturally had recourse to illustration models and frequently dipped into the deep well of traditional iconography. But images--even when seemingly within the limits of a model or convention--are of course also sites of reinvention. [9] Moreover, illuminators' patterns of inspiration are not always easily discerned. This is especially the case for many historical manuscripts, including cartularies, since historical works were less commonly illustrated before the end of the twelfth century. [10] Furthermore, the illuminator of a cartulary, faced with legalese and formalized salutations and invocations, encountered the problem of creating images suitable to such stuffy texts. How does one illustrate the fragmentary bookkeeping of a monastery's history? Some illuminators responded ambitiously to the task, such a s those that decorated the Cartulary of Mont-St-Michel with full-page illuminations. [11] Other cartularies include just a single image, such as the Cartulary of Vezelay, where the seated figures of donors Girard of Roussillon and his wife Berthe signal their patronage (Fig. 4). [12] Still other cartularies deploy large decorated initials to mark the start of important charters, such as those found in the Cartulary of Baignes. [13]

Of the hundreds of Romanesque cartularies that survive today, only a handful include illuminations. [14] It is perhaps due to their few numbers that these manuscripts have long escaped the attention of art historians as a significant genre of illuminated text. [15] Indeed, excepting a single, heralded image in the Cartulary of St-Martin-des-Champs [16] and certain widely reproduced images from that of Mont-St-Michel, their illuminations are little known. It remains to discern their patterns of illustration, their strategies of presenting monastic history, and their relation to other types of decorated manuscript. The choice of scenes illustrated is of course significant for any visual argument, whether depicting events from an abbey's history or recording "portraits" of donors. [17] But significant also for this manuscript genre is the occasional inclusion of authenticating symbols, such as monograms and seals. Such signs are both text and image in the document and may have been copied, forged, translated, o r otherwise manipulated during the fabrication of the codex. Additional features, such as the charters' original script and mise-en-page, were also transformed to the codex format. Much more than a transcription of text or a translation of text into images, Romanesque cartularies--the Vierzon example in particular--are testimony to the visual aspect of transcribing.

The present study limits itself precisely to those visual problems implicit in the transcription of charters. [18] Furthermore, as cartularies differ widely in their form and content, making generalization extremely difficult, this study focuses exclusively on the Vierzon Cartulary, whose assembly of images and notarial signs nonetheless provides a cross section of transcribing strategies. At issue is specifically the visual recombination of the charter texts and the insertion of images. Though manifestly a writing project, the resulting cartulary is anything but a textual "copy." Any presumptions of textual hegemony dissolve in the transcription, only to be reconstituted, transformed, in its imaged codex translation. Driving this process, I argue, is the struggle for authentic translation, the faithful renewal of the text for its new bookish guise. This authenticating struggle was set in motion by the transcribing copyist himself, who had to negotiate past notarial traditions for an updated codex. His was a performance, a ritualistic repetition of notarial custom, that contributed to "validate" the codex transcription. The illuminator belonged to this performance as well, and the exigencies of the documents led him, no less than the scribe, to infuse the work with an unusual imaging of diplomatic culture. Transcription is thus the site of authenticating translation, a visual translation of text, image, and performance. [19] Just as modern literary translation calls into question the processes of authorial creation and the status of original works, the interpretation of these copied charters must take into account the art of transcribing. [20]

From Oral to Written to Imaged

Leaping ahead to a Gothic image will momentarily return us to an originary, imaginary state of Romanesque cartularies. An illuminated roundel in the early thirteenth-century Guthlac Roll, produced probably in Winchester, provides a visual paradigm for the oral, textual, and visual dynamics of early charters (Fig. 5). The final image in this illustrated series devoted to the saint's life depicts Crowland Abbey, the monastic house of the abbot-saint Guthlac, receiving donations from sundry nobles and distinguished religious. [21] Thirteen donors, led by the eighth-century Mercian king Aethelbald, present their gifts to Guthlac's reliquary shrine. Seated near the shrine a frenzied madman expells a green demon from his mouth, a reminder that this was also a holy site of miracles. The gifts, whether properties, rents, or privileges, are absent from the image but are represented by their legal proxy, charters. The charters, here figured as scrolls, identify their donor and his gift in bold, easily legible letters: "I, King Aethelbald, give to you the seat of the abbey with all its appurtenances, free and without hindrance from all secular constraints." [22]

This roundel dramatically represents the oral, written, and visual levels of cultural language that accompany donations. Traditionally in the past, donors and recipients reached agreements orally. The tendentious authority of such oral agreements is observed in the quarrels that frequently erupted later between the parties. Systems of recording transactions gradually developed, first in royal and papal chanceries and then in local contexts, with the result that by the later twelfth century, and certainly by the thirteenth, written acts had largely supplanted an oral legal tradition. While they did not eliminate disputes over donations, binding proof increasingly fell to recorded elements of authenticity (the signatures and seals, for example). [23] The visual reference in the Guthlac Roll to charters testifies to the authority attained by the written word for such donations. Yet the choice of representing these charters as scrolls--speech phylacteries--is indicative of the persistent element of spoken witnes s. [24] These scrolls recorded in writing the oral act of donation and served as a future testament of a past act. Indeed, some documents produced during the long period of transition from an oral to written culture endeavored to record within their texts certain elements that summon past orality and performance. The text may, for instance, refer to the altar or relics on which the deal was concluded (a tradition perhaps alluded to by this roundel's staging in the abbey church). An act may cite a donor's gesture that represented metonymically the object donated, such as laying down a glove or a tuft of straw to signify homage or land. Or the gesture may even commemorate the very act of donating, rather than the donated object. This might be expressed by the symbolically enacted transfer of the charter itself or of the scribe's pen. [25] In the Guthlac roundel, the proffering of charters as speech scrolls and the penned introductory "ego" return us to such oral traditions. The "ego" itself announces a distant deictic moment, fleeting yet immortalized by the parchment and ink. Such charters allude to the very action of giving. They are a written index of conveyance ceremonial, recalling a precise spoken moment of religious beneficence. Ultimately, a charter's credibility is predicated on this symbolic (more than empiric) ability to capture and preserve--to authenticate--the moment.

In the Guthlac Roll the donation moment is further authenticated by collective presence. The roundel's inclusion of speech scrolls rightly prompted Michael Camille to refer to a compound notion of written and oral witness. [26] However, looking beyond the separate witness of each scroll, we discover that the roundel's image more importantly recalls the collective aspect of donations. Aural witnesses to the oral agreement were customarily required for an act's authentication, and the name of each person witnessing a donation was recorded at the end of every charter. In the case of a dispute, any one of the signatories could be summoned at a later date to give his account of the agreement he saw and heard. As written testimony gradually assumed a more authoritative role, the number of these aural signatories diminished, for soon the signature itself (rather than the collective aural witness it formerly implied) sufficed to validate the transaction. In the Guthlac roundel, the charter-scrolls do not conclude wi th signatures; rather, the introductory "ego" alone "signs" the text by declarative authorship. [27] Other "signing" witnesses are nonetheless present in the roundel image, even though additional attesting signatures are absent from these scrolls' texts: the witnesses are represented instead by the assembled crowd, listening to the "ego" texts and watching the transfer of the charters. Each of these thirteen donors is also himself a witness. In this way, each person as both author and witness is ingeniously implicated in the authentication of his own and every other donation. Similarly, the two witnesses "countersigning" the acts on behalf of Crowland Abbey are saintly Guthlac and the blessedly cured madman. [28] More than merely the text of a speech-act, the represented charter-scrolls are visual testament to the symbolic moment of conveyance. Speaking, hearing, writing, and viewing here combine to validate the acts and render them "authentic" as future testimony. The entire enterprise of speaking and record ing (imaging) the donations is self-referential and self-authenticating. The final signature to conclude the document--the wax seal of the abbey--is but a trace in the circular shape of the illuminated roundel.

This sealing of the Guthlac scroll concludes a series of roundels that depict the saint's childhood, teaching, visions, and miracles. In the selection of scenes depicted, it is little different from the numerous illustrated lives of saints preserved from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth century. [29] It is, rather, the choice of illustrating such administrative matters within the context of Guthlac's saintly life that is remarkable. The illustrator evidently felt there was sufficient cause to remind viewers of the saint's living participation in the exchange of donations and of the saintly protection that Guthlac's presence imparted on the abbey's temporal agreements. A chronicle produced at Crowland in the twelfth century in fact reports a disastrous fire in 1091 that destroyed almost all of the abbey's historical records. Those precious few documents that were spared destruction were said to have benefited from the miraculous foresight of Abbot Ingulf, who had had several of them copied. [30] The story of the rescued documents may be only legend, but regardless of whether such acts ever existed or were "lost" in the fire, the inclusion of this roundel as an illustrated chapter in Guthlac's Vita perpetuates the memory of these donations. Though nonbinding in a legal sense, the roundel presents a "copy" of each of the charter donations, whether destroyed or preserved, authentic or forged. Indeed, the process of reimaging the charters for the roundel bestowed a context of authentic donation even for any falsified works slipped in among those that were well known and indisputably authentic. [31] What is more, the roundel's mise-en-scene--this reenactment of ritualistic donation in the presence of the saint and ecclesiastical witnesses--validates not only the charters but also this, their imaged copy. This reflexive chain of authentication continues further still, as the evocation of past witnesses in the image combines with the present and …