Erinnerung—Niederschrift—Nutzung: Das Papsttum und die Schriftlichkeit im mittelalterlichen Westeuropa (review)

The Iberian arm of the Papsturkunden project, which aims to publish registers of all known papal documents before 1198 (see http://www.papsturkunden.gwdg.de), has lain dormant since the publication of Vorarbeiten in the 1920s (Paul Fridolin Kehr, Papsturkunden in Spanien, 2 vols. in 4 pts. [Berlin, 1926–28], and Carl Erdmann, Papsturkunden in Portugal [Berlin, 1927]). The Hispania pontificia project, now Iberia pontificia, was revived in 2006. A first volume of regesta has been published (Dioecesis Burgensis, ed. Daniel Berger [Göttingen, 2012]); at least eight more are planned. The book under review offers papers presented at a 2007 preparatory workshop in Göttingen that explored questions concerning the creation, preservation, and transmission of papal documents that can shed light on the relationship between the papacy and Iberia. Due to the nature of sources and the project, the chronological focus is on the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

A brief introductory chapter by Klaus Herbers offers a sophisticated hermeneutical framework that distinguishes the roles of perception, interpretation, and memory in the creation and proper understanding of sources, an approach that unfortunately re-emerges only occasionally in the rest of the volume. The threads that may be followed with ease are more basic: When and why were certain documents preserved? What explains the forms of preservation, and what is the internal logic of those forms? And—of principal interest to readers of this journal—what can all of this tell us about papal power and influence in Iberia?

Given the importance of cartularies for the transmission of papal records, they receive the most attention. Individual chapters address the structure of the twelfth-century stratum of the Liber fidei of Braga (Maria João Branco); the transmission of papal documents from Astorga in early modern codices (Santiago Domínguez Sánchez); the Tumbos and related works from Santiago (Fernando López Alsina); and problematic bulls from the Liber testamentorum of Oviedo (M^a. Josefa Sanz Fuentes). To this group can be assimilated a chapter on two hybrid twelfth-century sources from Santiago, the Historia Compostellana and the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Herbers). A comparative chapter on French cartularies argues well that the placement of papal records in them reveals geographies and rhythms of papal power (Harald Müller). These chapters document the overlap of pragmatic, propagandistic, and memorializing functions of the written word.

The remaining chapters are more varied in focus: the content and uses of (mostly lost) papal registers before the early-thirteenth century and their relationship to the Liber pontificalis (Uta-Renate Blumenthal); the introduction of Romano-canonical procedure into Iberia (Ingo Fleisch); the transmission and effectiveness of papal communications to the dioceses of the Extremadura (José Luis Martín Martín); and the culture of the written word in Catalonia and its relationship to Carolingian, Capetian, and papal developments (Ludwig Vones).

Iberia in the central Middle Ages is a particularly useful laboratory for the study of the intersection of papal power and the written word, in large part because of the peculiar circumstances of the Reconquista: the creation or reestablishment of dioceses in newly conquered lands, with attendant disputes over boundaries and primacy as well as conflicts between the various Christian kings, created an opening for an extension of papal authority at precisely the right moment in its history. Add to this the revival of the learned law and the long tradition of record-keeping on the Peninsula, and the veritable explosion of sources that are the subject of this volume makes perfect sense. As the comparative chapters on France and the papacy itself hint, however, these exceptional circumstances can nevertheless illuminate the study of papal power across Europe.