Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages by Alice Rio (review)

REVIEWS 282 On the other hand, Rebillard’s monograph presents a more ambivalent relationship with archaeology than his introduction indicates. In closing his opening chapter, Rebillard points to the frustrating circularity of examining archaeology records in conjunction with written ones, and thus proclaims his shift to an exploration of the latter for the remainder of the book. But while Rebillard acknowledges, at the end of chapter 3, that his hypothesis “should be checked archaeologically,” chapter 2 concludes with a consideration of the archaeological evidence of catacombs (56). His uneasy dance between the decision to exclude archaeological sources and the implicit recognition of the central role archaeological remains have for the subject at hand could have been more thoroughly and decisively handled. Yet, as he admits in his conclusion, his book’s “only claim regarding archaeological evidence is to suggest new questions” (176). The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity challenges its readers intellectually but with prose and organization that render it an accessible and enjoyable read. While scholars in the field of early Christian archaeology have already devoured and debated the original French version, this English translation makes an important text available to a wider group of academics as well as students. DANA M. POLANICHKA, History, Wheaton College Alice Rio, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009) xii + 299 pp. Formulae are model documents that survive from sixth- to tenth-century western Europe, found scattered across numerous manuscripts mainly from the Carolingian period. Nineteenth-century scholars, especially Karl Zeumer of the MGH, gathered these formulae into collected editions. The goal of these editions was to reconstitute the original, well-ordered collections of formulae from which the surviving manuscripts were thought to descend. By comparing the relationship between groups of formulae held in different manuscripts, and by using internal clues and apparent connections with surviving charters, these editors attempted to reconstruct these “original” formularies, and give some indication of when, where, and by whom they were compiled. The tidy and wellordered editions produced by these monumental efforts have formed the basis for almost all subsequent scholarship on, or using, formulae. In a magisterial recent book, Alice Rio completely upends the assumptions on which these editions were constructed, while offering a new, much-improved way of understanding these texts, one that allows valuable insight into early medieval literacy , legal practice, social reality, and much else besides. Why should we be interested in formulae at all? Why use model documents when we have charters and other surviving documents to answer questions about social and legal history? Rio wisely opens her book (20–26) by observing that while charters are immensely useful, those that survive probably constitute only a small proportion of documents produced and used in the early Middle Ages. Those that do survive deal almost exclusively with land transactions. Formulae offer a glimpse at interesting documents that don’t survive: manumissions , loans, dispute settlements, etc.: documents that pertain to the oftenhidden laity. Formulae point to much wider use of documents by this laity than REVIEWS 283 charters alone would suggest. As Rio shows in the last chapters of the book, formulae can also hint at complex social and legal realities, far beyond what written law codes will tell us. Clearly they are a source with great potential. The editions where we can access this source, however, are built on assumptions and intentions that leave the results deeply suspect. At the most basic level, even the term “formula” is a problem, as Rio discusses in detail (43– 57). The word is not one that was in common use in the early Middle Ages: it occurs only once in Marculf’s formulary (43). Rather, what we would call formulae are referred to by the same noun as actual documents: chartae. The blurring becomes even more apparent as we look at surviving collections of formulae . Actual letters (such as the only surviving copy of Einhard’s letters) were incorporated amongst formulae, clearly intended for use as models. Though “anonymization,” the replacement of (place)names with pronouns (e.g., ille), can suggest a text was a formula...