Sealing Signs and the Art of Transcribing in the Vierzon Cartulary

In the 1150 or 1160 the Berrichon abbey of St-Pierre at Vierzon produc a manuscript collection of its official transactions. [1] like 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 keep agreements originally spoken between sum of two units parties, and they thus constitute a written record of donations, privileges, and other secular and ecclesiastical engagements. As a document the two historical and legal, cartularies are a cherished research domain of historians and diplomaticists. The Cartulary of Vierzon, however, be entitled tos close art historical examination, as it is individual of very few such twelfth-century collections to have been embellished with elaborate illuminations. More than serving as simple illustrations of the true copy this cartulary's illuminations--highly unusual in their imagery and smooth in their style--resist traditional iconographic interpretation. smooth the images' relation to the legal body s is often unclear. The true copys after all, are a hodgepodge of legal protocols, invocations, oaths, and the like. The fact that these body s are infused with elements of orality and performance is perhaps a ball of thread that the interpretation of the images, too, should rather tease on the outside the fugitive, performative elements of diplomatic tillage The manuscript's production itself--the processe of transcribing and illuminating older charters--might have had a part in resuscitating these lost point of times It is this search for of that kind lost, elusive moments that ultimately forces a critical reconsideration of the text-image dynamic for an important genre of illuminated text

A handful of images punctuates the body of the Vierzon Cartulary. [2] After an initial illumination showing Saints Peter and Paul, images of [i]pontifex maximus[/i]s Calixtus II (fol. 1) and Hadrian IV (fol lv) introduce their respective acts (Figs. 1 2) A exhibition 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 sum of two units 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 parley a privileged tone on the cartulary, the posterior acts then report the local transactions of Vierzon's abbots. a certain number of of these are accompanied through standing figures of the abbots themselves, who have the appearance to introduce their acts. The first among these transactions are those of late ninth-century Abbot Sion (fol 4 Fig. 3) followed through those issued by earlier ninth-century abbots. This brief disorder rejected t he cartulary then not absents Vierzon's transactions more or les in chronological succession. All told, the Vierzon Cartulary contains the body s of 116 charters stretching from the ninth hundred to the middle of the twelfth hundred and through these acts single can trace the decisive occurrences that marked the abbey's history. [3]

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

A related feature of cartularies is their oftentimes open-ended production. Religious establishments occasionally produc several cartularies above a period of decades or centuries, collecting first their earliest acts and later producing a next to the first volume to update the bookkeeping. The Vierzon Cartulary, for instance, appears to be a midcentury transcript of an earlier twelfth-century manuscript. Evidently a crisis--Pope Hadrian IV's annulment of an improper election in 1154--called for a novel redaction by the new, justly pick outed Abbot Peter. Peter's new cartulary therefore places up forehead these most recent papal males that expose the fraudulent election and legitimize his have a title to [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 intent of correcting, clarifying, or otherwise augmenting the true copy of the original agreement. A cartulary could thus not absent an open-ended text, writing a monastery's history as an ongoing succession of events