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Reviewed by:
  • Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe–XIIe siècle)
  • Paul Freedman
Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe–XIIe siècle). By Michel Zimmermann . 2 vols. [ Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez, Volume 23.] ( Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. 2003. Pp. xxii, 613; 614–1403. €64.)

About 7,000 records of the ninth and tenth centuries survive in Catalan archives, and something on the order of twice that number are extant from the eleventh century. These quantities are impressive although not unique. As Pierre Toubert points out in his introduction to this massive study, Bavaria, Sabina, and the Vendômois also produced thousands of documents in this period collected in cartularies and other later compilations. There are three unusual features of the early documents from the Catalan regions: the diversity of transactions, their survival in single-sheet original form, and the preponderance of agreements between laymen. These factors are crucial for understanding the importance of Michel Zimmermann's exploration of written communication from the incorporation of the Spanish March into the Carolingian Empire until the formalization of notarial practice in the early thirteenth century.

The archival wealth of Catalonia is accompanied by an almost total absence of narrative texts such as chronicles or hagiographies, so that the problems and opportunities for studying the world of the Pyrenean counties of the ninth to twelfth centuries are peculiar. An exhaustive analysis of the different scribes, writing styles, and transaction types (wills, sales, leases, feudal agreements, donations) makes it possible to come to some remarkable conclusions about Catalan society in its formative period, an accomplishment achieved here through rigorous disquisitions on how and why these documents were drawn up. Zimmermann's ambition is not the utilitarian one of describing a social system [End Page 355] through its records, but rather to focus on the act of writing and its implications, from the expense of producing documents to the unacknowledged but ubiquitous influence of Isidore of Seville's Sententiae and Etymologiae. Zimmermann's findings reveal sharply and vividly (if in brief flashes) the lives behind the mass of routine transactions.

Anyone who has worked with Catalan archival material will have wondered about such things as why the Latin is so oddly defective, why oaths of fealty are undated, or why autograph signatures (sometimes accompanied by poetic tags) abound in certain kinds of records. Why are so many topographical features listed in land sales and donations? When and why is Judas singled out in closing maledictions as an exemplary transgressor as opposed to Datan and Abiron (from Numbers 16:1–33)? Beginning with the tools of writing, Zimmermann then describes who requested and who composed records and in the process answers these and every other conceivable question concerning the format, language, appearance, and typology of documents. From this carefully constructed foundation he then elaborates the literary atmosphere of this era, the writing and collecting of books, the structure of education, and the reciprocal cultural influence of Catalonia and the rest of Europe.

Écrire et lire en Catalogne contains just over 1,000 pages of text, accompanied by twenty-six appendices concerning, for example, the activities of individual notaries, documents that mention payments to scribes, and evidence for books and readers culled from donations, wills, and library catalogues. Zimmermann has written an imposing work in the grand tradition of the now abolished French thèse d'état, of which this is one of the last examples, presented at the end of 1992. Although the book is sumptuously produced (in addition to the appendices there are maps, color plates, and detailed summaries in four languages), the text has not been updated and is essentially that of the thesis. In his introduction, the author explains that he was initially reluctant to have the thesis made into a book at all, but was persuaded by others including the publishers, the French school in Madrid (Casa de Velázquez). He determined that the effort of incorporating new material would be excessive, and the somewhat odd result is that the voluminous citations of specific documents don't take into account the rapid pace of printing archival records during the eleven-year interval. Records dated before 1000 from the...

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