This chapter analyses Thucydides use of sources and his approach to evidence. It surveys his (possible) use of documentary sources and eye-witness testimony, before going on to discuss specific types of evidence cited in the text: inscriptions, letters, poetry and prose writing. The second part of the chapter explores the ways in which Thucydides’ approach to history (and to the writing of history) might have influenced his use of sources, drawing particular attention to the influence that Thucydides’ views of religion might have had on his presentation of events.

This chapter works through the evidence that connects Paris 2123 and the Flavigny formulas to a real historical world; that is, the evidence that the scribes who copied the formulas understood the texts that they were copying and thought that they were important and relevant. It first takes up the evidence that connects Paris 2123 to Flavigny, and works through the manuscript’s entire contents to establish the context for the Flavigny formulas themselves. It then shows how scribes behind the Flavigny collection deliberately selected their formulas; that is, chose which to copy, which to discard, and how to arrange them, and how they merged and blended preexisting material to create the formulas that they wanted. It also demonstrates the care the scribes took in copying the formulas; that is, in organizing them and making them easy to refer to, correcting mistakes, clarifying obscure language, and so on. From this material the chapter works outwards to similar evidence in other formula manuscripts, in order to further demonstrate that the formulas are not disembodied texts, but in fact have a historical context that lets us anchor them in a real world and use them as sources to learn something about that world.

This chapter works through the evidence that in the world envisioned by the Flavigny formula collection and its companions, lay people used documents and letters like those that the formula collections contain to do things that did not involve churches and monasteries, and explore how the formulas say that they used them. This evidence is considerable, and extends well beyond laypeople simply appearing as actors in transactions that were recorded in writing. It includes transactions assuming in principle that the actors involved would keep the records for future reference: laypeople presenting documents as evidence in disputes; provisions for laypeople to update their documents by erasing parts of them and then writing in new words; documents that refer to other documents; references to lay archives, particular some that had been destroyed and whose contents needed to be replaced. Socially document use ranges from members of the elites, to unfree acquiring documents giving them freedom or presenting documents as proof that they had been free to begin with, to lower-status people showing up in front of someone with higher status with a letter of recommendation, to merchants carrying copies of royal privileges with them.

This chapter pulls together the previous chapters’ conclusions about the early medieval laity. It then asks why new, Carolingian-style formula collections stopped being made in the course of the tenth century. After surveying possible answers offered by the scholarship, it suggests – while acknowledging that we will likely never know for certain – another, namely that they continued to be produced as long as scribes wanted to write their documents and letters like others were writing theirs, for a clientele whose interests could span very long distances. As the Carolingian world disintegrated in the later ninth and tenth centuries, this became less important. The chapter closes with the history of the manuscript Paris, BNF, ms. lat. 2123, as it disappears from view, surfaces in the early modern period, arrives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and ends up in the hands of Karl Zeumer as he edited the formulas for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the MGH edition, the impact that Zeumer’s editorial methods had on the formula texts and their images of the laity, and the resulting dangers of treating this edition, rather than the surviving manuscripts, as a primary source.

This chapter introduces the formulas as a source genre and in particular the manuscript and formula collection that occupies the center of this study: Paris, BNF ms. lat. 2123 and the formulas from Flavigny. It also introduces the concepts “early medieval Europe” and “early medieval laity,” in order to frame the questions that shape the book. The chapter briefly describes how the category “lay” even came to exist; that is, how and when a category “clerical” distilled out of late and post-Roman Christian society and came by the Carolingian period to separate clergy and monks from laypeople. From there it moves into what we know about how lay people lived their lives in post-Roman and early medieval Frankish Europe, and what remains unknown that makes it worth writing a new book about. The chapter then sets the Flavigny formulas in the context of the other Carolingian formula collections, presenting it (and them) as a gateway into a different world. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the steps we need to open the gate and to understand what we see on the other side, and the topics we will explore when we get there.

This chapter tackles two principal problems with connecting the formulas to a real world: their often difficult or incorrect (by classical standards) Latin, and the late Roman and early Merovingian legal language that has led to them being labeled as antiquarian fossils. The chapter argues that the idiosyncratic Latin of the formulas in fact communicated essential content in regions where the spoken languages were evolving into Romance, as well as (with the help of glosses and occasional vernacular words) where they were Germanic. The obsolete (or obsolescent) legal language reflects a legal culture in the eighth and ninth centuries in which – especially in western areas with strong Roman roots – references to Roman law and procedure still meant something. Roman legal language gave some documents an imprimatur of authority. Descriptions of antique procedures bore a recognizable relationship (though not necessarily an exact correspondence) to how those transactions were actually carried out. In short, the legal and formulaic inheritance of Rome in the western regions of the Carolingian world contributed to a normative framework that lent authority and legitimacy both to documents and to the legal procedures that they recorded.

This chapter examines ten or so English language or bilingual documents obtained, produced, copied, adapted and forged at Christ Church Canterbury between the 1090s and the mid 1150s. Beginning with a remarkable series of bilingual writs issued by Henry I and his successors, it also analyses a purported bilingual notification of Cnut, apparently confected around 1100, and a remarkable English-language version of a diploma of Cnut, relating to the port of Sandwich, produced at approximately the same time, as well as a document of Æthelred contrived from it fifty years later. Consideration of the documents suggests this activity involved monks, both English and French, who felt the use of English made their contentious claims more plausible. In the hundred years after the Norman Conquest, these men continued, and even expanded, the range of ways in which English could be used as a language of documentary record.

Computational information processing has gradually supplanted traditional records and recordkeeping for the physical record, undermining practices centered on the “moral defense” of the record and supplanting them with practices centred on datafication. Prioritizing data malleability rather than the defense of information from manipulation and corruption has, this chapter argues, contributed to the current diminution of the trustworthiness of information and an unravelling of society’s evidentiary foundations. Fields such as archival science and the law have long considered questions of how records may testify to the events and actions of which they form a part – serving as proofs of claims, that is, as evidentials – but research in the field of computing has only relatively recently focused on these issues. Despite its roots in computing culture, blockchain technology offers the promise of an immutable ledger that may halt the processes of datafication contributing to the current widespread potential for manipulation of records. The design and spirit of blockchains – offering the ability to cryptographically “fix” the record, chaining it in place so that any tampering is extremely difficult and immediately evident – harks back to a pre-digital past when the materiality of paper records more readily fixed in place transactional “facts” and protected their integrity from manipulation.

This chapter specifies the methods used in the book to studying the alliances between local and intervening counterinsurgency allies. Nine wars are examined in the book. Five wars are studied using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including the USA in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam, as well as India in Sri Lanka and the USSR in Afghanistan. For these five wars, thousands of primary source US, Indian, and Soviet government documents describing the day-to-day workings of these alliances were examined and used to identify 460 specific policy requests, which were then incorporated in an original dataset tracking local compliance and other relevant variables. The coding rules for each variable are detailed in this chapter. The remaining four wars, namely Vietnam in Cambodia, Egypt in Yemen, Cuba in Angola, and Syria in Lebanon, rely on secondary historical accounts or primary source observations from outside actors such as US intelligence agencies.

The mushrooming bureaucracy of the Roman empire made much of documents. These written records – rescripts, inscriptions, edicts, among other things – became a gold standard of authority within a certain ideological schema. But the system was also open to ruffling. This chapter looks at how two seemingly unrelated authors – Justin Martyr and Suetonius – lodged their respective challenges to the authority of the imperial document. First, it examines how Justin manages to be parasitic on the fidelity of the document to find an authorised imperial home for Christianity, at the same time as he devalues the cold culture of official writing against the hot Christian culture of orality and immediacy. Second, it explores how Suetonius stages a movement in his Caesars from faith in the imperial written bureaucracy to disenchantment with documents, and to a concomitant investment in oral forms of knowledge. Most importantly, this epistemological drift actually explains the infamous ‘decline’ of the Caesars from dutifully documented, bureaucratically robust biography to glorified gossip column. The discourse of the document provides a new language of interaction to conduct this meeting of disparate texts.

This chapter assesses Phlegon of Tralles’ paradoxographical works Peri Thaumasion and Peri Makrobion, and demonstrates that Phlegon’s use of source citation and other strategies of authentication in these works is designed to appeal to a range of readers and reading cultures in the cosmopolitan Roman empire. In the tradition of Greek paradoxography that dates back to the Hellenistic era, Phlegon offers many citations from literary sources for the marvels he reports; these are all Greek authors, and predominantly Hellenistic or earlier in date, and would fulfil Greek-speaking readers’ expectations for the traditions of paradoxography. Other strategies, however, seem designed to appeal to Roman expectations. Phlegon’s use of autopsy as an authenticating trope echoes what Latin authors (Mucianus, Pliny the Elder) brought to the genre. Finally, Phlegon’s citation of documents such as census records is designed to appeal to inhabitants from across the empire who would have had personal experience of Imperial record-keeping. By combining all three of these authenticating methods so that they mutually reinforce one another, and dovetail in a believable way with readers’ extratextual experiences, Phlegon updates what was originally a Hellenistic, highly literary genre for the contemporary era and his boundary-crossing readers.

In the History of the Church of Rheims, Flodoard devotes significant attention to describing the acquisition and defence of property by the bishops of Rheims. Flodoard’s emphasis on church property has often been thought to be a generic, unremarkable aspect of ‘institutional’ historiography. This chapter argues that Flodoard’s focus on Rheims’s property was far more targeted, and that he sought to justify his church’s claims to specific lands in response to the schism that wracked the archbishopric in the first half of the tenth century. After surveying the evidence for property management in early medieval Rheims, I examine Flodoard’s techniques as an archivist and his activities as an administrator involved in land disputes. Claims were constructed on the basis of written texts (sometimes forged), local tradition and recent history. This chapter also considers the question of genre as it pertains to such works of institutional or local history as well as the implications of its findings for the audience and function of the History.