Monks, Monasteries, and Manuscripts: Archival Sources for Eleventh-Century France

The investigation of producing and preserving records in a specific historical context such as eleventh-century France can add to our understanding of the place of archives in contemporary society. Although relatively isolated and underdeveloped at that time, French society produced many documents, called charters, similar to those in modern archives. Charters recorded gifts, sales, legal judgments, and even court testimony of someone in authority. As the only literate institution, the Church had a near monopoly on the production and preservation of these documents. Our vision of that era is shaped less by its historians than by its humble record keepers—the medieval counterpart of the modern archivist.