MY FOCUS HERE lies at the crossover or, rather, the convergence of charter analysis and cultural history. What I plan to show is how cultural history, in this case historiography—etiological narrative rooted in a quest for origins—is immersed in charter writing and the memory it perpetuates. However, notarial writing and the construction of historical discourse are two very different areas which, although they are not radically opposed, affect fields of epistemology and memory that have no real connection with one another.

For this reason, it is essential to agree on the terms used and the nature of the material they designate, providing them with a precise meaning linked to the purpose of their usage. Far from attempting to discover an essential connection, resulting from scriptural homology, between documentary writing and the creation of historical discourse, I wish to identify and analyze a relationship which initially had nothing to do with fate or necessity. This unusual position is the substance of my approach: a causality of coincidence, a genesis woven in pure temporality, which undoubtedly represents an original feature of Catalan history. On one hand, we have a purely material, utilitarian, and accounting phenomenon, merely legal and, in all cases strictly individual. This was the precursor of notarial writing at a time of private deeds: in other words, the transcription and written preservation of the transactions and rituals of everyday life (donations, purchases and sales, notices of pleas, records of the consecration of churches, and so on). The important point here was to ensure they were memorized by providing an immediate, simultaneous transcription of the contracted commitment, for which the written document gave legal significance. I would like to place this in diachronic symbiosis, on the other hand, with a strictly cultural phenomenon involving memory: the writing of history with a desire for intelligibility and a true reconstruction of the past. The two phenomena are, by nature, dif-ferent if not contradictory. One is an operation of record in the context of a practice of preserving memory for the future and the other is an operation of returning to the past.