"This edition presents the recently rediscovered episcopal cartulary of Auxerre, composed in the 1280s but assumed lost since the French Revolution. [It] also includes the short thirteenth-century cartularies of the nuns of St-Julien and of the cathedral chapter, the latter existing only in fragmentary form."--Publisher description.

This edition presents the recently rediscovered episcopal cartulary of Auxerre, composed in the 1280s but assumed lost since the French Revolution. Along with confirmations by popes, quarrel settlements with counts, and agreements with the bishop’s tenants, the cartulary contains documents that were previously unknown, notably several papal decisions. Auxerre was unusually well documented for the period 800–1200, but little information on the bishopric’s history after 1200 has been available until now. The text contains a wealth of information about relationships between church leaders and other churches, between churches and secular leaders, and details on peasant rights and obligations. This edition also includes the short thirteenth-century cartularies of the nuns of St.-Julien and of the cathedral chapter, the latter existing only in fragmentary form. With full annotation of people and places and English-language summaries, these cartularies make a valuable contribution to our understanding of this significant episcopal centre’s history.

With full annotation of people and places and English-language summaries, these cartularies make a valuable contribution to our understanding of this significant episcopal centre's history.

In Negotiation and Resistance, Constance Brittain Bouchard challenges familiar depictions of the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of impoverished and powerless workers. Peasants in eleventh- and twelfth-century France had far more scope for action, self-determination, and resistance to oppressive treatment—that is, for agency—than they are usually credited with having. Through innovative readings of documents collected in medieval cartularies, Bouchard finds that while peasants lived hard, impoverished lives, they were able to negotiate, individually or collectively, to better their position, present cases in court, and make their own decisions about such fundamental issues as inheritance or choice of marriage partner. Negotiation and Resistance upends the received view of this period in French history as one in which lords dealt harshly and without opposition toward subservient peasants, offering numerous examples of peasants standing up for themselves.

Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages. Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into narratives of disaster and triumph, ninth-century churchmen deliberately forging supposedly late antique documents as weapons against both kings and other churchmen, and sixth- and seventh-century Gallic writers coming to terms with an early Christianity that had neither the saints nor the monasteries that would become fundamental to religious practice. As they met with political change and social upheaval, each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to be reinterpreted or quietly forgotten. By considering memory as an analytic tool, Bouchard not only reveals the ways early medieval writers constructed a useful past but also provides new insights into the nature of record keeping, the changing ways dynasties were conceptualized, the relationships of the Merovingian and Carolingian kings to the church, and the discovery (or invention) of Gaul's earliest martyrs.

The twelfth century was characterized by intense spirituality as well as rapid economic development. Drawing on unprecedented research, Constance Brittain Bouchard demonstrates that the Cistercian monks of Burgundy were exemplary in both spheres. Bouchard explores the web of economic ties that linked the Cistercian monasteries with their secular neighbors, especially the knights, and reaches some surprising conclusions about Cistercian attitudes.

How did people know what they knew, and learn what they learnt? As Derek Pearsall's introduction makes clear this is the primary focus of this collection of essays published in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. The learning materials included range from grammar books to mystery plays, and from court records to monastic chronicles, as well as liturgical and devotional texts. But the essays are not only concerned with texts alone, but with the broader and often fluid social environments in which learning took place. Many of the papers therefore question the validity of some distinctions habitually used in the discussion of medieval culture, such as the opposition between orality and literacy, between Latin and the vernacular or between secular and religious. All but one of the contributors are literary scholars and historians who completed their post-graduate work at the University of York. They are Joyce Hill, John Arnold, Linda Olsen, Janet Burton, Patricia Cullum, Katherine Kerby-Fulton, Deborah Cannon, Pamela King, and Stacey Gee. Katherine Zieman, although not a York graduate, is a most welcome contributor to the volume.