Thanksgiving for Internet treasures

There is no doubt that this employment thing has cut into my blogging. I am badly behind with what I would like to write here: I have nine post stubs and six seminars I’d like to say something about here, and we’re almost out of year. So to try and clear backlog I’m going to lump proto-posts together and keep them short, and this is the first, in which I acknowledge two people for supplying links to things I’ve been wanting to be online for ages and which you may also enjoy.

With thanks to an ex-student

I have been after this quote for ages. I suspect that I met it somewhere in Rosamond McKitterick’s collected papers but foolishly imagined that I’d remember it rather than making a note. Now I have come across it while looking for something else entirely in the Livejournal of an ex-student who would probably rather not be identified, as the LJ itself does not identify them, so I shall have to hope they will be satisfied with this level of recognition.

O beatissime lector, lava manus tuas et sic librum adprehende leniter folia turna, longe a littera digito pone. Quia qui nescit scribere, putat hoc esse nullum laborem. O quam gravis est scriptura! Oculos gravat, renes frangit, simul et omnia membra contristat! Tria digita scribunt, totus corpus laborat. Quia sicut nauta desiderat uenire ad proprium portum, ita scriptor ad ultimum uersum.

The scribe then goes to explain that the illustrious Count Aumohenus ordered him to write this text, which is a copy of the Burgundian laws, and that is also really interesting, but it’s the quote I wanted not the context for all that.¹ Returning to my informant’s words:

Roughly translated: O most fortunate reader, wash your hands and thus take hold of the book, turn the pages carefully, keep your hand far from the page! Those who don’t know how to write think it is easy. O how hard it is to write: your eyes are burdened, your kidneys break, and all of your limbs get discouraged. Three fingers do the writing, but your whole body works. Just as a sailor wishes to arrive at his home port, so does a scribe long for the last line.

I’d like to dedicate this to all of my current students who are facing Collections exams at the beginning of next term and hope it may ease your writers’ cramp. But then the second thing arrived! And this is, perhaps, weightier.

And with thanks to Alice Rio and ARTEM

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"Charte antérieure à l'année 1121", they say

You probably have to be a real charter geek to have heard of the ARTEM project, but it was considerable. Based at the University of Nancy,² a team spent a long time building a database of all the surviving original medieval charters in France dating from before the year 1121. This is a fair few, even though it’s not, you know, Spain. They had both scans and transcriptions, all kinds of searchable stuff and generated not a little interesting scholarship about the documents they now knew better than anyone else (till Mark Mersiowsky came along). But you had to go to Nancy to use it, which meant that the dissemination of this data was, shall we say, restricted. Now, at last, the ever-estimable Alice Rio informs me that at least the texts are now online in full, here. I haven’t yet had time to properly explore what this means; at the very least, however, I expect to be a considerable help when I finally get round to reading my shelf-bound copy of Benoît-Michel Tock’s Scribes et souscripteurs in pursuit of my long-stalled ultimate paper on charters, probably shortly before finding that between Michel Zimmermann and Mark Mersiowksy‘s massive works since emerged I have nothing left to say.³ Which would, in some ways, be a relief, but being able to check in with the texts that Tock, who was part of the ARTEM team, will have cited will make that book a lot more enlightening than it might have been otherwise. Who knows what lurks therein to be found by the person with a particular enquiry? Maybe that person is you! If so, now you know where to enquire. And for now that must be all.

2. Where confusingly, since this project finished, they have reused the acronym ARTEM for something else entirely, unless I have got completely the wrong end of some or other stick.

3. Referring respectively to: the full version of the thing I gave as “Fixing documents in late-Carolingian Catalonia” in the first-ever Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic session at Leeds, ‘Clods, Altars, Donors and Records: Reading Narratives and Emotions in Early Medieval Charters’, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 11th July 2006, which is likely to remain in progress a lot longer alas; to M. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IX^e-XII^e siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols; and Mark Mersiowsky, Die Urkunde in der Karolingerzeit. Originale, Urkundenpraxis und politische Kommunikation, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Schriften) 60 (Hannover forthcoming).

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.