Ceremony, charters and social memory: property transfer ritual in early medieval Catalonia

Work on the use of documents in the Middle Ages has now accepted that written record-keeping in Europe did not collapse with Roman rule, to be replaced only by orality and memory, but continued throughout the period, albeit to greater or lesser extents from place to place. Nonetheless, much remains unclear about how documents were actually used and understood following the Roman collapse, and how far that reflected continuity with the past. Using the numerous early medieval charters from modern Catalonia, this article argues that, instead of registration in public archives as under Rome, documents here were validated by social consensus about their contents, created by repeated recitation of the texts. This could even be used to create new documents. The article argues that this was an innovative replacement of older institutions of record intended to enable continuing document use, but that it blurs categories both of literacy and orality and of continuity and change; continuity of the land charter was here maintained despite the discontinuity and irrelevance of many other practices. Both documents and their users were agents in these processes, in ways that can instruct us about institutional survival and replacement in times of social change.