The Anger of St Peter: the effects of Spiritual Sanctions in early medieval Charters of Donation

Although most surviving early medieval charters granting land to the Church threaten spiritual penalties for infringement, from the anger of God to eternal crucifixion in the Inferno, it has become a commonplace among scholars that these sanctions were ineffective, the resort of a Church without other means of defence after the decay of a public judiciary in the West. Are we then to assume that those threatened doubted the efficacy of such sanctions? Did they not believe that the Church could engage God and the saints to enact such consequences? And if so, why did the use of these clauses persist? Were they merely formulaic, thus implying that the Church too doubted their active import? This communication will test such ideas with two different institutional corpora, those of the cathedral of Sant Pere de Vic in what is now Catalonia and the monastery of St-Pierre de Beaulieu in the Limousin, and argue that while the general aim of such clauses was the appropriate representation of the Church’s other-worldly backing, variations in their usage must be explained in other terms which let historians get closer to individual pieties and preoccupations, and potentially also individual doubts and disbeliefs.