On Stone and Skin: Inscription of Communities at the Foundation of Sant Pere de Casserres

The history of the Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, in modern-day Catalonia, is relatively well-studied, but includes an acceptance that it became a monastery in around 1005 by the agency of Viscountess Ermetruit of Osona. Before that, however, the site had been home to a church, whose congregation and priests are partly recorded in inscriptions preserved on an ancient altar-slab from the site. A critical re-examination of the monastery's supposed foundational documents, and their comparison with the slab and other surviving charters from the church's and monastery's archive, establishes that the conversion from church to monastery was neither quick nor simple, and probably contested by the church-'s old congregation. This article performs that re-examination and suggests what the power dynamics and solidarities in the area may have been that could explain the record as we now have it. In so doing, as well as questioning both Ermetruit's role in and the traditional 1005 date for the monastic conversion of the site, it suggests that recognition by the would-be founders of the congregation's investment in their traditional place of worship was crucial to the eventual success of the foundation, a situation perhaps repeated in other times and places.