The cartulary's status as a source for the medieval period has been fundamentally re-evaluated in the last few decades. It is now a well-established principle that cartularies are sources ‘in their own right’ rather than only supplements to the study of original documents. If understood as a compilation rather than a repository, it is argued, then the cartulary is able to yield valuable insights into its creators. Studies have addressed a variety of questions, including why cartularies were produced, how they functioned, and how they might be defined. A review of the field's current scope and central themes will allow us to appreciate the potential significance of the new approach which takes a different path by tracing the patterns of growth in two medieval cartulary manuscripts.

An overview of the field

In the early 1990s a number of seminal studies were published which argued that the cartulary represented a distinct ‘genre’ of writing. As such, the cartulary was worthy of study as a text in its own right. Two landmark publications can be said to have opened up this novel perspective: Les cartulaires (a collection of essays published in 1993, edited by Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse) and Patrick Geary's Phantoms of Remembrance (published in 1994). Les cartulaires brought together the proceedings of a round table in 1991 organised by the École nationale des chartes. The volume's twenty-seven essays are an assortment of studies on cartularies mainly from France, from the very earliest cartularies in the ninth century to early modern cartularies. This important publication has been very influential for Francophone scholarship in particular. Patrick Geary's study of memory and memorialisation, on the other hand, set out the idea that cartularies might be as much about curating and preserving memory as they were about administration. This has been a profoundly influential idea in subsequent Anglophone as well as Francophone cartulary scholarship.

It is important at this point to cast an eye back to the nineteenth century, since many of the ideas established in the 1990s can be seen as a reaction against the legacy of the scholarly editing work in that century. During this time many cartularies were published by antiquarian clubs and societies.