(no subject)
For once, my livejournal silence has been the silence of productivity. I've been hard at work all weekend on my database, and I spent part of today on it too, and part of it at the archives. Progress! But today I'm here to talk about the archives.
First of all, the archives départementales d'Ille-et-Vilaine have some quirks:
1) GLOVE WEARING, if you're working on their earliest documents like I am. THICK GLOVES. The kind of gloves that are unwieldy enough that you actually do more damage wearing them than not... but what can you do?
2) You know those terrifying moving bookcase ranges that libraries have for their government documents and (as in my link) for general library-basement-y purposes? The lockers at the archives are like that. They're only about armpit height on me, so they're unlikely to result in hideous crushing accidents, but they are kind of a pain if people are trying to get things out of two banks of lockers at once... which is impossible.
3) Architecturally snazzy floor-to-roof front doors. Like, a full, really tall, storey high. AND HEAVY. The kind of doors that make me have to flop around tugging at them to get them open. And I may be lacking in upper-body strength, but I am not that light!
That said, everyone there has been very nice and very helpful. I'm not sure if it's actually me being in a slightly less daunted frame of mind than I was in Angers, or not, but they make everyone in Angers seem totally mean in retrospect.
On the other hand, in continuities with my experience in Angers last fall, the first document I looked at today was probably the most daunting one I'll face here. In Angers, my first document was H3331, the early twelfth-century pancarte roll in pieces from Saint-Florent-sous-Dol. Today it was 6H2/3, a fragment of a charter from La Trinité, Combourg, that was salvaged recently from a book-binding. It was incomplete and horribly creased and cracked with lines of ink rubbed off (I think it must have been in the spine), and difficult to read!
I also have to say that, after spending a year with the charters of Saint-Florent, it was really weird today to look at my first charters from Marmoutier! I've read some of them in print editions, but not that many of them. The actual documents made an immediate impression on me - Marmoutier and Saint-Florent had really different documentary cultures, apparently! Saint-Florent doesn't have that many surviving eleventh-century originals from its Breton properties, but the ones I looked at, and the ones I saw other people looking at, are, I now realize, neither very fancy nor very standardized. The writing is tidy (mostly) but plain, and the parchments themselves are pretty small, if you discount the couple of surviving pancartes/pancarte rolls. They're also irregularly shaped and irregularly folded. Not the case with the Marmoutier charters! They're big, and and much more regularly shaped, and the ones I looked at that weren't heavily damaged all had the marks of being folded into the same small rectangles and carefully labelled. They're also laid out much more carefully on the page, with the witness-lists separated from the main text of the charter and arranged evenly in columns. The writing is tidy, but it's much fancier than at Saint-Florent. The letters s, l, and f are very tall and have serious, recurring flourishes, and the abbreviation marks are various involved loops that I'm still working on deciphering. They also have the vertically-elongated majuscule opening lines that I think are an imitation of papal chancery practice. It is all very... fancy, and a little harder to read than Saint-Florent's friendly, gently clubbed minuscule!
That was different... and kind of like looking into an alternate universe! An alternate universe full of strange turns of phrase and strangers, too! The two documents I looked at from La Trinité, Combourg, were missing their witness-lists, so I couldn't tell how much overlap there was with the people (or technically, the generation before them) who show up in the Saint-Florent-sous-Dol documents I'm working on right now, but the charters from La Trinité, Fougères, which I glanced at briefly and will deal in more detail tomorrow, were full of names I didn't recognize. Unfriendly! Of course, I'm not saying that I think Saint-Florent was the good Ligerian benedictine monastery in Brittany and Marmoutier was the evil one, except what am I talking about, I totally am saying that. I would totally have had a beer with William of Dol, abbot of Saint-Florent, and his brother John, monk of Saint-Florent and archbishop of Dol had I had the chance. I cannot say the same thing about their father, Riuallon of Dol, who founded La Trinité, Combourg. In fact, I sort of think William and John jumped on Saint-Florent's bandwagon as hard as they did in order to reject their father and his patronage of Marmoutier, but I don't think I can prove it... and what's that rumbling noise? Oh wait, it's all the French historians with ridiculous theories about why William chose to become a monk at Saint-Florent when he renounced the lordship of Dol. They seem to be coming for me with torches and pitchforks... In any case, until I get to know Marmoutier better, it's going to be the unfriendly stranger monastery in the neighborhood of my brain.
That said, signs point to I'm going to continue to get a little emotional whenever I'm sitting in an archive looking at eleventh-century documents, no matter what they are. I definitely got a little misty today.
First of all, the archives départementales d'Ille-et-Vilaine have some quirks:
1) GLOVE WEARING, if you're working on their earliest documents like I am. THICK GLOVES. The kind of gloves that are unwieldy enough that you actually do more damage wearing them than not... but what can you do?
2) You know those terrifying moving bookcase ranges that libraries have for their government documents and (as in my link) for general library-basement-y purposes? The lockers at the archives are like that. They're only about armpit height on me, so they're unlikely to result in hideous crushing accidents, but they are kind of a pain if people are trying to get things out of two banks of lockers at once... which is impossible.
3) Architecturally snazzy floor-to-roof front doors. Like, a full, really tall, storey high. AND HEAVY. The kind of doors that make me have to flop around tugging at them to get them open. And I may be lacking in upper-body strength, but I am not that light!
That said, everyone there has been very nice and very helpful. I'm not sure if it's actually me being in a slightly less daunted frame of mind than I was in Angers, or not, but they make everyone in Angers seem totally mean in retrospect.
On the other hand, in continuities with my experience in Angers last fall, the first document I looked at today was probably the most daunting one I'll face here. In Angers, my first document was H3331, the early twelfth-century pancarte roll in pieces from Saint-Florent-sous-Dol. Today it was 6H2/3, a fragment of a charter from La Trinité, Combourg, that was salvaged recently from a book-binding. It was incomplete and horribly creased and cracked with lines of ink rubbed off (I think it must have been in the spine), and difficult to read!
I also have to say that, after spending a year with the charters of Saint-Florent, it was really weird today to look at my first charters from Marmoutier! I've read some of them in print editions, but not that many of them. The actual documents made an immediate impression on me - Marmoutier and Saint-Florent had really different documentary cultures, apparently! Saint-Florent doesn't have that many surviving eleventh-century originals from its Breton properties, but the ones I looked at, and the ones I saw other people looking at, are, I now realize, neither very fancy nor very standardized. The writing is tidy (mostly) but plain, and the parchments themselves are pretty small, if you discount the couple of surviving pancartes/pancarte rolls. They're also irregularly shaped and irregularly folded. Not the case with the Marmoutier charters! They're big, and and much more regularly shaped, and the ones I looked at that weren't heavily damaged all had the marks of being folded into the same small rectangles and carefully labelled. They're also laid out much more carefully on the page, with the witness-lists separated from the main text of the charter and arranged evenly in columns. The writing is tidy, but it's much fancier than at Saint-Florent. The letters s, l, and f are very tall and have serious, recurring flourishes, and the abbreviation marks are various involved loops that I'm still working on deciphering. They also have the vertically-elongated majuscule opening lines that I think are an imitation of papal chancery practice. It is all very... fancy, and a little harder to read than Saint-Florent's friendly, gently clubbed minuscule!
That was different... and kind of like looking into an alternate universe! An alternate universe full of strange turns of phrase and strangers, too! The two documents I looked at from La Trinité, Combourg, were missing their witness-lists, so I couldn't tell how much overlap there was with the people (or technically, the generation before them) who show up in the Saint-Florent-sous-Dol documents I'm working on right now, but the charters from La Trinité, Fougères, which I glanced at briefly and will deal in more detail tomorrow, were full of names I didn't recognize. Unfriendly! Of course, I'm not saying that I think Saint-Florent was the good Ligerian benedictine monastery in Brittany and Marmoutier was the evil one, except what am I talking about, I totally am saying that. I would totally have had a beer with William of Dol, abbot of Saint-Florent, and his brother John, monk of Saint-Florent and archbishop of Dol had I had the chance. I cannot say the same thing about their father, Riuallon of Dol, who founded La Trinité, Combourg. In fact, I sort of think William and John jumped on Saint-Florent's bandwagon as hard as they did in order to reject their father and his patronage of Marmoutier, but I don't think I can prove it... and what's that rumbling noise? Oh wait, it's all the French historians with ridiculous theories about why William chose to become a monk at Saint-Florent when he renounced the lordship of Dol. They seem to be coming for me with torches and pitchforks... In any case, until I get to know Marmoutier better, it's going to be the unfriendly stranger monastery in the neighborhood of my brain.
That said, signs point to I'm going to continue to get a little emotional whenever I'm sitting in an archive looking at eleventh-century documents, no matter what they are. I definitely got a little misty today.