Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages [Hardcover]

This revealing study explores how people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, needed, used and kept documents.Documents are the key building blocks of medieval social history. In this book, a series of tightly linked essays reveals for the first time the extent of their use and preservation by the laity in post-Roman Europe, North Africa and Egypt.Documents are the key building blocks of medieval social history. In this book, a series of tightly linked essays reveals for the first time the extent of their use and preservation by the laity in post-Roman Europe, North Africa and Egypt.Many more documents survive from the early Middle Ages than from the Roman Empire. Although ecclesiastical archives may account for the dramatic increase in the number of surviving documents, this new investigation reveals the scale and spread of documentary culture beyond the Church. The contributors explore the nature of the surviving documentation without preconceptions to show that we cannot infer changing documentary practices from patterns of survival. Throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages  from North Africa, Egypt, Italy, Francia and Spain to Anglo-Saxon England  people at all social levels, whether laity or clergy, landowners or tenants, farmers or royal functionaries, needed, used and kept documents. The story of documentary culture in the early medieval world emerges not as one of its capture by the Church, but rather of a response adopted by those who needed documents, as they reacted to a changing legal, social and institutional landscape.1. Introduction; 2. Lay archives in the Late Antique and Byzantine East: the implications of the documentary papyri Peter Sarris; 3. Public administration, private individuals and the written word in Late Antique North Africa, c.284700 Jonathan P. Conant; 4. Lay documents and archives in early Medieval Spain and Italy, c.400700 Nicholas Everett; 5. The gesta municipalia and the public validation of documents in Frl³&