I should have read this the moment I bought it, VIII

All right, last one of this series as I finally reach the end, blog-wise, of Jennifer Davis’s and Michael McCormick’s The Long Morning of Medieval Europe. The last section, two articles and a commentary paper, is entitled ‘The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art’. It’s led, apart from the McCormick introduction, by the redoutable Mayke de Jong pondering the structure of the upper reaches, quite literally, of Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen, the solarium that so many of that family seem to have had problems with in times of evil auspice (as recently mentioned by Magistra et mater).¹ Mayke perhaps works too hard to imbue the royal balcony, where few are allowed and from which everyone else can be seen, in Notker’s Panopticon-style depiction, with symbolic significance, but the political significance of access to the king’s private counsels and the visibility of that access is very sharply drawn out, along with the way Einhard makes it clear in his Translatio Marcellini et Petri that he enjoyed such access. Thomas Noble quibbles about the architectural details in the response paper but is basically in agreement.²

The cathedral of Aachen as it stands today

I have to question the importance that both place on the term solarium itself though. Mayke spends a few pages demonstrating that the term is used almost, if not actually, exclusively of buildings that the king might be in, palaces and royal vills and so forth, and Noble compares usages in Rome and concludes, “Perhaps solarium was not a common word”.³ This may well be true for the central Carolingian zone and the ninth century, I certainly wouldn’t want to try and prove otherwise, but on the other hand, it takes me only two or three minutes to find this, from rural Catalonia in 921:

In nomine Domini. Ego Atto et uxor sua Virgilia, que vocant Druda, vinditore sumus tibi Amblardo et uxor tue Eldregodo, emtores. Per hanc scriptura vindicionis nostre vindimus vobis terras cultas et incultas, vineas edificatas vel ad edificare, regos et subreganeis, nostro proprio, qui nobis advenit per nostro comparacione quod nos emimus de te ipso emtore vel iamdicta uxori tue. Et sunt ipsas terras cultas et incultas, vineas edifikatas vel ad edificare, regos et subreganeis in comitatum Ausona, in valle Ausore vel infra ipsos termines. Sic nos vobis hoc vindimus hec omnia quod nos de vos compara^vimus in predicta valle Ausore vel infra ipsos termines, exceptus ipsos domos vel ipsos solario cum curtes et ortos et terras et vineas et cultum et incultum, qui fuerunt     de condam Geirardo, quod vos ipsos comparastis de condam Geirardo vel de filios vel filias suas, vel de eredes illarum…

Yes, OK, sorry, perhaps too much Latin, sorry, I got carried away.⁴ (The superscript addition and the gap are in the original, the emphasis is not.) Rendered into breezy English though, a curious tale emerges:

In the name of the Lord. I Ató and his wife Virgilia, whom they call Druda, are seller to you Amblard and your wife Eldregoda, buyers. By this our scripture of sale of do we sell to you cultivated and uncultivated lands, vineyards constructed or to be constructed, streams and pools, our own, which came to us through our purchase that we bought from you the selfsame buyer or your already-said wife. And these cultivated and uncultivated lands, constructed and to-be-constructed vineyards, streams and pools are in the county of Osona, in the Vall d’Osor or within its term. Thus we sell this to you, all these things that we purchased from you in the aforesaid Vall d’Osor or within its terms, except those houses and that solar with courtyards and barns and lands and vines both cultivated and uncultivated, which were       of the late Gerard, which you yourselves bought from the late Gerard or his sons or daughters, or [his daughters'] heirs…

So, OK, it pains me but let’s leave aside the question of why Ató and Virgilia, I mean Druda, are selling back this land that they bought from these same guys, less what sounds like a plum and well-developed little farmstead that had belonged to another guy before that. Mainly I am willing to leave it because I don’t have the index volume of the relevant charter collection to hand so I can’t look any of these people up easily. The point is that Gerard’s old farmstead has a solar, as I usually translate it, an upper storey partly open to the sun; balcony might do but we’re talking a whole floor here, I think. This is not an uncommon thing; it’s uncommon enough that I had to search a bit, and you could, given how rattly and distorted the Latin of this document is, agreements all over the place, orthography varying and so on, argue that this is just a formula. Certainly the word is unusual, but on the other hand it is clear that these things are cut about to fit the circumstances of the document’s issuing. What I mean is, most transaction charters in this area don’t mention houses with solars. When they do, the most obvious reason is, it seems to me, is that there is one, not that the scribe that day has a model charter or a formula which covered that. If that was the case I’d expect a range of other gear that sometimes turns up too, dovecotes, winepresses, sheds, meadows. The fact that these things are not here but a house with a solar is, for me, best explained if they were actually selling a house with a solar. So I think Ató and Virgilia’s house had one, and so did a few other places.⁵

Map of central Osona and the Ripollès, Catalunya, c. 950

Now, Osor is not an area full of palaces. It’s a bit up in the mountains: on the map there, if you can see Sant Llorenç near the middle bottom right, the Vall d’Osor is the next river valley south-east. So it’s probably two days’ walk to Vic, less if you don’t mind crossing some 800 m-high mountain ridges but it must be 35 km if you stick to the valleys. It’s a decent day’s walk down to the Ter too, and the Ter bends so much upriver that rowing wouldn’t get you anywhere any faster unless you had to cross anyway. Osor seems to have been well-settled at this point, there’s no new land being taken in even if it’s not all being used, but it’s some way off being top-rank.⁶ There are a couple of reasons to suppose that these are well-to-do people, though, not least because they get 50 solidi for the land they sell back, which gives us a sort of ballpark figure for the worth of what they keep, in as much as the way they’ve described things only makes much sense if the lands that they retain are enveloped within what they sell, so it must be smaller. 50 solidi is a fair bit of money by local standards, but it’s an order of magnitude smaller than what places that get called palaces go for out here.⁷ The other sign of status is that Ató apparently signs the document himself, which implies a certain amount of leisured education, though around here it’s perhaps not all that far out of the ordinary. Anyway, there really isn’t any prospect of the king or probably even the count turning up at Gerard’s old house. And this is a big one; I could find you other (less interesting) examples that are worth lots less.⁸

View down the Vall d'Osor, viewed from the source of the river of the same name, from the Catalan Wikipedia

So, well, I don’t want to be over simple but I think there may be two things going on here that decrease the significance of Mayke’s royal balconies: firstly, as ever, we’ve just got more data out here and that means more odd stuff turns up, whereas in the north big estates are much more common per charter survival because the little stuff hasn’t made it down to us. Secondly, well, weather, quite frankly. I’m sure they have some lovely summers around the Meuse and Aachen, in fact Gabriele at the Lost Fort will doubtless have pictures of half the relevant areas in blazing German sunshine, but you still might not build for it in the same way as you do nicely south of the Pyrenees. I think we can expect to see more solars in Catalonia than in Francia because there was just that much more sun, to be honest. This doesn’t diminish the significance of Mayke’s points about access to the king and the articulation of power in architecture at all, of course; but it does warn us about arguments that include silence. There is so much dark matter in statistical use of medieval documents, because we never know what we might have if the preservation had been kinder.

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 14000, the so-called Codex Aureus

Anyway. The second paper in this section is a lavishly-illustrated one (though colour would have made such a difference here, especially as it features in the argument in places; the above manuscript’s cover makes Kessler’s plate 2, and it may be clearer in grey-scale, but, well…) by Herbert Kessler about depictions of Christ in the Carolingian period.⁹ This was a sticky issue, as you may be aware, because of the response to the Byzantine controversy over the use of icons in worship. The problem is the Biblical prohibition on idols, of course; is a picture of God, even in human form, really even slightly holy, or is it a graven image that distracts the worshipper from the real divinity that can only be experienced in the mind and the soul? Christ was after all a man, and one can depict that, but can one depict the God that that man also was, or is to draw Christ actually to deny one of his natures? One of the great merits of this paper is that it actually provides a reasonably accessible way into these debates for the laymen by marrying up text and image and showing how the images try to get round the problem or confront it, individual artists making informed choices of presentation such as leaving some of Christ out of the picture, vanishing out of the top of the frame at Ascension as below (the manuscript that sources Kessler’s plate 7, but even this tiny image is more fun to look at than the greyscale) and so on. Not only does one get a sense of craftsmen at work on something highly intellectual, rather than just colouring nicely as medieval art sometimes gets presented, but one also sees how these images were taking positions in a debate of the day and, not least important, genuinely concerned with Salvation and how best to help someone towards it rather than hinder them.

Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS Y6, fol. 81v.

This therefore supplements the somewhat less successful section on religious practice earlier in the book and winds the volume up, after Noble’s few adjustments, very nicely.¹⁰ My initial bedazzlement with the volume has worn off slightly after this much detailed analysis and reviewing, but really, it’s still a very worthwhile volume. It’s also physically nice: the paper is gloss and heavy, the binding tough but good-looking and the dust-jacket is glossy and thick too. The illustrations, where they exist, are good (though, yes, greyscale) and there are, as far as I noticed, almost no typoes. There are fully 18 pages of index, whereas with most edited volumes there wouldn’t be any, suggesting that the publishers or the editors recognised that it will have reference value as well as reading value. Furthermore, though some of the papers are not quite there and some areas are definitely less covered than others, it really is a pretty all-round state-of-the-question assemblage of work on Carolingian Europe and so, I continue to recommend its purchase to those who might want such a thing.

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1. Michael McCormick, “The Intellectuality of Early Medieval Art” in Jennifer Davis & idem (edd.), The Long Morning of Early Medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 275-276; Mayke de Jong, “Charlemagne’s Balcony: The Solarium in Ninth-Century Narratives”, ibid. pp. 277-289.

2. Thomas F. X. Noble, “Matter and Meaning in the Carolingian World”, ibid. pp. 321-326 at pp. 321-324.

3. De Jong, “Charlemagne’s Balcony”, pp. 282-284; Noble, “Matter and Meaning”, pp. 321-322.

4. Text from Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, I doc. no. 232.

5. For example, Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, I doc. no. 214, “… vindimus tibi casas cum curtes et ortos, cum solos et superpositos et terras cultes et incultes, nostras proprias…“. But, you say, a solum is not the same thing as a solarium! Check it in the new online Lewis & Short, man! To which I say, firstly, du Cange says you’re wrong, at least sometimes: Charles du Fresne du Cange & D. A. Carpenter, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, ed. G. A. L. Henschel, re-ed. L. Favre (Paris 1886), p. 523, “SOLUM, ut supra Solarium, Locus idoneus solarium ædificando”, and secondly, well, that’s why my first example had “solarium” instead innit.

6. This sort of assessment is much easier for owning Jordi Bolòs & Victor Hurtado (edd.), Atles del comtat d’Osona (785-993) (Barcelona 2001); the map on pp. 44-45 is most useful here.

7. For example, in Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV I doc. 419 Bishop Radulf of Urgell and his son Oliba sell an estate at a place called Palau to the bishop’s brother Count-Marquis Sunyer of Barcelona, Girona and Osona and that goes for 1000 solidi. This isn’t going to have been a royal palace, but given that Abbess Emma also has land next-door it is clearly comital family land, and that and the name suggest strongly that this was a fiscal estate, a big hall and its demesne or similar. For the suggestion that place-names in Palau (‘palaciolo‘ or similar) refer to such establishments, see in this case A. Benet i Clarà & A. Pladevall i Font in Pladevall, J. Sarri i Vilageliu, Benet & D. Arumí i Gómez, “Santa Maria de Palau” in J. Vigué (ed.), Catalunya Romànica II: Osona I, ed. J. Vigué (Barcelona 1984), pp. 230-235 at pp. 230-231, and more generally Ramon Martí, “Del fundus a la parrochia. Transformaciones del pobliamento rural en Cataluña durante la transición medieval” in Philippe Sénac (ed.), De la Tarraconnaise à la Marche Supérieure d’al-Andalus : les habitats ruraux (IV^e-XI^e siècle). Desde la Tarraconense a la Marca Superior de al-Andalus: los asentamientos rurales (siglos IV-XI), Méridiennes : Études Médiévales Ibériques 2 (Toulouse 2006), pp. 145-166, citing Martí, “Palaus o almúnies fiscals a Catalunya i al-Andalus” in Hélène Debax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal : Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie (Toulouse 1999), pp. 63-70.

8. For example, that mentioned in n. 5 above went for only 15 solidi and the solos are only part of the estate there.

9. Herbert Kessler, “Image and Object: Christ’s Dual Nature and the Crisis of Early Medieval Art” in Davis & McCormick, Long Morning, pp. 290-319.

10. Noble, “Matter and Meaning”, pp. 324-326.

 

Wow. How much is wrong with this?

Is there some reason that explains why these things are got wrong? Why don’t some journalists, when about to trot out some ‘facts’ about history, just check with a historian first? I expect better than this of the Times:

Five things we know about the Anglo-Saxons:

• The first Anglo-Saxons were mercenaries, brought in by the Picts to defend themselves against pirates.
• They were not Christians until St Augustine’s arrival in 597 led to their gradual conversion.
• The Anglo-Saxons were fiercely tribal, with England divided into the kingdoms of Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex and Sussex.
• From Alfred the Great onwards (he died in 899) the Wessex army gradually united England, driving out Danish and Viking invaders.
• The Bayeux tapestry, which depicts the story of the battle of Hastings, was commissioned by the Normans but is believed to have been made by Anglo-Saxon artisans.

And five things we don’t:

• How quickly they converted to Christianity is a mystery. The burials at Sutton Hoo, about 625, were pagan but some Christian symbols were found.
• Much of Anglo-Saxon architecture is unknown. Many buildings were wooden and few are left standing beyond the monasteries and churches built of stone.
• Little is known about how people, particularly the lowly peasants, lived their daily lives.
• How Anglo-Saxon women lived is unclear, although they were able to own property.
• What happened to London between the Roman retreat and the 9th century, when it became a centre of prosperity once more, is not well documented.

Okay, I’ll start with three: one, ‘the first Anglo-Saxons’ were probably, semantically, the scribes who first used the term in a document in an age where everyone else was still seeing Angles and Saxons separately, but even if we allow the anachronistic category, the Anglians and Saxons were hired as mercenaries against the Picts not by them; two, you appear to think, Daniel Foggo, that women cannot be peasants or at least that the two groups count as two zones of ignorance but actually we know about as much about how peasant women lived as peasant men, and that, as a visit to West Stow would show you, is more and more all the time and not so little even now either; and three, you forgot some missionaries. Also, the Times is still apparently convinced that ignorance about London is ignorance about life. I think this is someone writing an article from their undergraduate notes. I’m glad that he thought it was worth doing, but I wish he’d also thought it was worth checking. Any more howlers here anyone would like to call out?

(Hat tip to Archaeology in Europe for this one.)

 

Whether to blog about teaching

One of the big things I get from being part of the medieval academic blogospheric conspiracy effort is a shedload of perspectives and wisdom on teaching. A lot of the people in my blogroll are engaged, one way or another, with communicating stuff about the Middle Ages to the young, or at least, the novitiate. Those who blog anonymously or pseudonymously have the most freedom to talk about this, and if I tried to list the times I’ve read something at Blogenspiel, The Rebel Letter, Not of General Interest, Quills or The Adventures of Notorious, Ph. D., to name but a few, and thought, “ah, I’ve met that” or “I’m sure to meet that before long” and been educated by their responses, or at least recognised the particular brick wall against which their heads have been banging, I… well, it would be a long list. The process of evaluation and design of outcomes that these people put themselves through has taught me, who have just done less of this than have they, a lot.

Now that I’m teaching again, I’d like to give something back, but not being anonymous, the issues are very different, even supposing that I have anything to say. The last teaching gig I had, one of my students had found this blog within a week, and my teaching group was so small then that there was really no way that, if I’d said anything more specific than “I need to re-write that lecture if I ever give it again”, it would have been possible to obscure what ‘teaching moment’ had inspired me. That seemed like something to avoid, not least because it was unfair on the students to expose them like that but also because it might potentially be actionable. After all, the law on blogs is pretty darn rubbish as yet. Similarly, if I’d said something that could be read as a comment on an institution where I was readily locatable, given the number of my colleagues who know this is here, it would probably not have made any friends unless I’d only said nice things.¹ Some people manage this, Richard Nokes and Michael Drout most obviously successfully pull off the double of being both positive and also informative about their classroom practice and results, but I’m not at their level. For all these reasons, student confidentiality, institutional codes of practice written or tacit, correct self-promotion and my own sense of how much I have to learn at this game even now (do we ever stop, after all?) I shall not be blogging about teaching here.

Except. This paragraph is my only exception. The week of writing, this passage from Notker the Stammerer’s Gesta Karoli was in the assigned reading for the seminars, among a lot of other stuff, but there:

This incident led to another much greater and more important. For, when your imperial majesty’s most holy grandfather departed from life, certain … mighty men, I say, despised the most worthy children of Charles, and each tried to seize for himself the command in the kingdom and themselves to wear the crown.²

Now, these kids all have History A-Levels, or at least responded yes to my initial check that they did. It seems that a full quarter of the marks at A-Level (which is England’s final school qualification for those of or around 18 years of age) in History, at least in the first board I searched up, still go for commentary on actual source extracts, and so it should. In other words, they ought to have done this before. So, I feel quite strongly that the question, “So, who is Notker writing this for?” should not have drawn an utter blank from the entirety of both my seminars at this point. Even if they can’t work out who exactly the “imperial majesty” in question is, I would submit that those words are a clue. But no dice. I’m not entirely sure what to do about this, which seems to me like a failure of reading comprehension. I don’t have much latitude to change materials or class titles, so there’s only so remedial I can get and I don’t even think that’s really the right approach, but I should certainly be doing more than nagging them to read more closely and providing examples or testing their reading each week. But one way or another I intend that by the end of the semester they will be reading things for details as well as for overall sense. And any advice that the sages of the Interwebs have here will be gratefully appreciated.

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1. I will however risk saying here that if anyone reading is in the UK and does a bit of carpentry or braziery on the side, you should consider getting in touch with KCL’s History Department and offering to make them some new map-mounts. The maps they have and can’t use are miles better than anything anyone will ever be able to put through a data projector and it’s a shame. I bodged up ways of using them while I was there, stringing them from screen housings and so on, but it would be better to be able to have both map and screen at once and I think they might be sympathetic to some suitably pragmatic offer to that end.

2. It’s from cap. 12, one of four paragraphs of Notker they had to lose it in.

 

I should have read this the moment I bought it, VII: what we need is more power

It’s being very hard to find time to write any substantive blog just now, though I have sufficient queued up that by the time me saying this finally emerges and you read these words this may no longer be true. Anyway, I haven’t quite finished praising Jennifer Davis and Michael McCormick’s The Long Morning of Medieval Europe yet, much though you may wish I had, and it’s time for another dose.

Part Four of the book is on government and power and this is, as Magistra observed when I started talking about this volume, one of the stronger parts of the volume. Janet Nelson, no less, spends a pellucid ten pages analysing a list of hostages and their captors who were to be brought to a royal meeting at Mainz, and produces from it a network of status and responsibility that is emblematic of the way that connection to the court brought both to those in power in the regions, and thus explains why people bothered with the whole kingdom thing one more time.¹

The Frankish noblewoman Dhuoda, from Wikimedia Commons and I don't know where before that

Then Matthew Innes talks about this same process with a focus on property, and picks up Dhuoda, two sets of Carolingian officials and the letters of Einhard to show how people got, were given or tried to lay hold of property and how connection to a greater power than them would help to do that. As you will be aware I think most to all of what Matthew writes is brilliant, and this is no exception; on the other hand I had a pre-print draft of this in 2005, so I have, you might say, learned to love it. It hasn’t changed a great deal but I like to think I had a slight effect on it.²

In between these two things, rather oddly, sits Jennifer Davis’s piece arguing that all this emphasis on locality and region is all very well but we mustn’t forget the centre, and having said as much she gets pretty solidly into the capitulary legislation and what it has to say about the actual running of the kingdom. This wouldn’t be much of a new direction were it not for the fact that she is quite post-modern, or at least post-Wormald, about her reading of the laws, accepting that they weren’t meant to impose uniformity; instead she argues that they were couched so as to allow for an almost infinite variety of local circumstances to be negotiated then and there. I don’t think you can go down this road without starting to see Carolingian legislation as an expression of an ideal, rather than a practice, and to be faintly surprised when it seems to actually be in use, but Davis won’t look in that direction and prefers to see an administrative state rather than an ideological one. I’m still not sure, but she uses her evidence well.³

A folio of the Capitulare de Villis, from Wikimedia Commons

Lastly Stuart Airlie, as it should be wherever Carolingian power is in discussion, wraps up , emphasising the communications that held the Empire together and demanding more comparison with other empires in an attempt to challenge and refine whatever we think is ‘Carolingian’ about all of this, rather than just, well, successful.⁴ As he says, if we can’t identify that properly any talk of change before, after or during the Carolingian era is decidedly questionable, to which I say, indeed and don’t we know it who work on the tenth and eleventh centuries and consider Charles the Fat still fairly early? So, well, I aim to help, in the long run, with this programme he throws into the air, but these articles will all help when I do.

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1. Janet L. Nelson, “Charlemagne and Empire” in Jennifer R. Davis & Michael McCormick (edd.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 223-234, with the key text given in translation as an appendix; if you want Jinty explaining the whole system, of course, you should read her “Kingship and Royal Government” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History vol. II: c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 383-430.

2. Matthew J. Innes, “Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire” in Davis & McCormick, Long Morning, pp. 247-266.

3. Jennifer R. Davis, “A Pattern for Power: Charlemagne’s Delegation of Judicial Responsibilities”, ibid. pp. 235-246.

4. Stuart Airlie, “The Cunning of Institutions”, ibid. pp. 267-271.

 

Eleventh-century Vikings at the Two Towers?

At the time of writing, which at current rates is something like three weeks behind appearance here, when at work I am mainly doing copy-editing of a certain book that it would be tactless of me to identify, given what I’m about to say and what I think of its chances of actually emerging. However, it has set me on a hunt, because it mentions as an unreferenced throwaway that the city of Lugo, in Galicia, north-west Spain, was sacked by Vikings in the early eleventh century. Now, I will confess, it was news to me that the Vikings were anywhere near Spain then, but it transpires that actually Norse sea-raiding was The Genuine Problem at that time and there was certainly enough of it to become a cliché in relic translation narratives and so on. However, sacking a whole city? There are books that ought to mention this and they don’t. However, Richard Fletcher’s St James’s Catapult, so much more than an incomprehensible title, does find a quote from Sampiro’s Chronicle suggesting that Lugo was threatened and also says that Tuy was sacked, which we apparently deduce from episcopal vacancy and which is associated with a serious raid of 1015-1016; this asssociation appears to go back to Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s La España del Cid but Fletcher was suitably cautious so I guess no-one actually says straight out that the vacancy was the fault of Vikings.¹ I will check Sampiro, but I think this bit has to come out, or at least be heavily modified. That wasn’t actually what I was going to talk about.

The ruins of a tower at Catoira, Galicia

While searching the web for something that included Lugo in the relevant destructions, I found this, a write-up of a visit to a place in Galicia called Catoira. Here stand the Torres de Oeste, ‘Towers of the West’, which are alas two opposite ends of a ruined castle through which a road has been driven. Before that mishap this place Catoira apparently did pretty well using this fortress to hold off Viking attacks, and indeed English ones hundreds of years later, and every year the town has a festival celebrating this.

Longboats in Catoira harbour for the annual festival

As for the post title, the site whose pictures I’m cheerfully linking to here reckons that either Tolkien or Tolkien’s illustrators had seen the pair of towers divided, so iconic are they. I have no idea if Tolkien ever went to Galicia, though certainly some of the Lord of the Rings names are familiar from my work (Frodo, as far as I’m concerned, was a Bishop of Barcelona, 862-90, pro-Carolingian, property reclaimer and first bishop of the see to strike coin, height and hairiness unrecorded), but it is certainly a nice idea. You can picture this as a suitable illustration quite easily:

The Two Torres de Oeste at Catoira, Galicia

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1. Referencing Richard A. Fletcher, St James’s Catapult: the life and times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford 1984), online at LIBRO, last modified 16 August 2000 as of 17 October 2009, p. 23 & nn. 52 & 53, and Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (Madrid 1934), 2 vols, transl. H. Sutherland as The Cid and his Spain (London 1934).

 

Writing in large quantities

I have to be brief here at the moment, given claims on my time, which is ironic because as you all know I find it much easier to go on at length. Rare is the day when I don’t hammer out something on the keyboard; even my e-mails have on occasion been printed out as booklets to be read on trains, so loquacious do I get in text. This is how come I wind up with fourteen draft papers, of course; I find it a lot easier to think in text than to organise material inside my head. But I feel bad about pointing this out sometimes; it’s certainly annoyed those close to me struggling with writer’s block in the past, and there has been a lot of this on the Interweb, this late lamented summer, among people I read (largely collected here and heroically fought here).

I don’t want to write self-help here or preach or assume any kind of superiority. The people who are having problems with words are all, after all, in better jobs than me; they have got some important things worked out. I, meanwhile, pontificate academically rather than finishing things and making marks. But I can write. So I thought I’d at least try and explain how I set about it, and if it’s useful that’s great and if it’s not it can at least document my freak status a bit better. I can’t go on at length because I have to write, ironically: I am only just keeping up with the lectures, which is the kind of writing I enjoy least; unless one’s very lucky one uses them once only, has no chance of feedback from the informed, and fundamentally they are only a script, not to be stuck to rigidly, lest the dozy audience are sent even more quickly to sleep. There is no sort of writing less rewarding than this. But it has to be done. And that’s the key really. Let’s work from outside inwards.

1. Environment fretting is an excuse for procrastination.

It is a limited amount of help to me to have a clean desk, I find that physical clutter is easily mirrored in my head but I often have to plan on trains, in snatched minutes at work, add paragraphs here and there between house-work and meals, and it’s possible. If you know what you need to say, it can be done, and if you don’t, there’s your first problem. So fix that first then ensure your environment is better next time, perhaps.

2. Planning can never be too detailed.

I’ve certainly written, or delivered, things from a short list of bullet-points; in fact that was what I aimed to take into all my undergraduate exams in my head. That said, it only works if those bullet-points link to fully-developed ideas in your head, and if you’re doing new work those ideas probably aren’t fully developed. There are a bunch of ways to plan writing, most of which don’t suit me; I just scribble stuff on a piece of paper then try and put it into a sensible order once I’ve suitably conditioned, erased, supplemented or otherwise tweaked it. But that’s not the start; how do you get off the blocks?

3. Consider the knowledge of your audience

OK, this is the only trick I might have; and maybe you all did this anyway and I’m insulting your intelligence, sorry. But, though you can write for writing’s sake, if you want to communicate you can make that the core of your planning. Firstly, what is your big idea? If you had to give an elevator pitch, what would the one-sentence argument of your paper be? Don’t verbalise it yet. Instead, picture to yourself the personification of your target audience. Imagine that what you are writing is a personal letter to them. Imagine that they wrote asking you to tell them about your topic. What do they need to know to understand that idea? Write those things down as keywords or headings. What is the established view, how does your view differ? Or, if you’re presenting new evidence: what is known, what are you adding? How does this show what you want it to show? Can you summarise that for them now? Work out, in other words, how you would tell this to a friendly and intelligent audience. What would they need to know to get it? How would they most enjoy being told your theory? These are the things that I think need to be in the plan.

4. Write the audience a letter

With this accomplished, you presumably have a lot of bits that eventually have to go into an order, even if they all refer to each other. These bits can be done separately. (If they can’t, you may need to clarify them.) You may find that you can work up a skeleton full of headings, and then fill it out bit by bit; these headings may not need to be in the final text. Do it when you can, but don’t drop it and come back to it ages later; trust me I know. Write your plan while it can stay in your head, and if it can’t, write smaller chunks of plan and fill those out. Think of it as something the recipient could refer to if someone asked, ‘hey your friend is doing some work on x, right; what does she think?’ Give them what they need to explain to that interlocutor. And eventually you have a first draft.

5. Notes come later

Do not slow yourself down by looking things up while writing, or if you can bear it, while planning. That way lies shiny distraction and sidetracks. Write your argument, then source it. If parts of it don’t really seem to be sourced where you remembered, this is an okay time to find out; it’s a shame to have to throw away done work but your thinking now has a structure and you can more easily rebuild than build.

And this, as I say, more or less works for me, as these thousand-plus words would seem to testify. It’s been many years forming up as a method, and if it saves you some time that’s great. If not, call it weird and flawed by all means; after all, I don’t have very much in print. But the words, it does make. Maybe for you also.

 

I should have read this the moment I got it, part VI

Part Three of Jennifer Davis’s and Michael McCormick’s The Long Morning of Medieval Europe is called ‘Representation and Reality on the Artistry of Early Medieval Literature’, and is one of the thicker and more enjoyable sections. That said, not very much of is actually about literature as such and I suspect that some of our more literature-based readers wouldn’t really recognise the approaches. What we have is Paul Dutton doing one of his curiosity vignettes by investigating what the (historical) sources are doing when they mention rains of blood, Joaquin Martínez Pizarro looking at the Historia Wambae’s type-scenes and asking if there’s more to them than meets the motif index, and Jan Ziolkowski going through the Waltharius for weapons geekery and asking if this makes it easier to date. Then Danuta Shanzer adds a short review paper salting these with about a hundred other references to late Antique literature and her usual bracing elision of the distance between the medieval them and the reading us.¹

The linking theme here is that they’re all basically asking, “can we believe this stuff?” You know, is it, fundamentally, historical, even if we have to go through contortions to get the facts out? This isn’t really a new direction to my mind, but the ways that they are attacking their texts possibly are. For example, Dutton quite quickly shows that there is actually reasonably good evidence for red rains in Europe and that they can mostly be put down to Saharan dust swept up by strong winds; his most recent example, albeit with only anecdotal evidence, is from Münster in 1992 (watch out Theo) and discerning use of that Famous Web Search Engine finds some pictures from someone that they claim were taken during such a storm in Greece. He then spends the rest of his short paper asking why the medieval people experiencing this took it so readily to be blood? He finds various texts in evidence of the idea that for almost all medieval thinkers (as usual Eriugena is an exception), and indeed the people at large, the weather was down to God, so that if something funny happened with it it must be for a reason and the question was merely one of what. He also however suggests that by the twelfth century it was more readily accepted that there might be less supernatural causes, and Shanzer questions this by saying that just because we have a lot of scholastics willing to consider such opinions doesn’t mean that non-élite belief altered so much.²

Martínez analyses the Historia Wambae as literature, but reckons that because it is actually deviating from the type-scenes it’s exploiting in some important ways, the real path of the events it describes lies underneath like lumps under a blanket (my simile, not his). Shanzer wonders whether the type-scenes of history and literature aren’t distinct, but I wonder more seriously whether one can apply this argument, which I use happily for charters—when they deviate from the formula there’s a reason—so easily for literature, where the reason is not going to be as simple as, ‘there really was a dovecote in the courtyard but they didn’t have any meadow’.³ In short, are we actually sure that Julian of Toledo was writing history not literature, I mean, was it even meant to be true? This question has been asked in other contexts lately by Magistra and the discussion there has obviously influenced where this one goes; as so often, her blog helps me think about this stuff, so thanks are due.

Lastly, as I say, Ziolkowski gathers the very disparate historiography of early medieval weaponry—this is not the sort of subject that gets a lot of work, in part I think because it is seen as boy’s-own-history pursued only by wargamers, which is just daft given how much work has been done, for example, on ploughs and even stirrups—and so work has to be cited from the last hundred years rather than the last ten. Nonetheless, he gathers it, and finds references in the Waltharius both to current and antique weapons, and there rather runs out of steam. He is, however, I think quite correct to say that it’s only by this sort of endeavour of filling out the author’s world that we will come to be able to place the text better in its context, and I think this is the newest direction of the three, though obviously there is a need to work out why there are weapons from several periods being referenced and what the poet thinks they mean.

Romantic depiction of Ekkehard of St Gall, supposed by some to be the author of the Waltharius, writing it

Two things strike me about these papers. The first, despite the rather bleak appraisal I’ve given above, is how much fun they are. All three main authors write very enjoyably, often just by bringing out their sources to play: Dutton is as ever masterful at this, and Pizarro, though he doesn’t provide any stand-out moments of insight, unrolls his interpretation in faultless prose. And Ziolkowski made me laugh out loud with this:

Long before pointed brass cones became fashionable, terms that had originally pertained to body armor were transferred to haute couture, and especially to lingerie. The most memorable such transference is the case of the Old French designation for “armor of the arm, arm guard”, whence the modern brassiere. Such dainties are put, of course, in the armoire.⁴

Just as Carl Pyrdum some time ago managed to claim any discussion of Angelina Jolie’s body as medieval studies, I think Ziokolwski here manages to annexe women’s underwear (leaving Marco Mostert only the men’s…). Now the next time I play Pink Floyd’s `Arnold Layne’ I shall think of him—but in a good way! Meanwhile, Danuta Shanzer’s wrap-up and review is fabulous, a parade of parallels; I never really feel much connection to her material, because her late antique intellectuals so clearly inhabit a different world to my earnest Benedictines and frontier warmongers, but I enjoy reading it a great deal. And she often turns interpretations completely over just for fun, as here:

Scientific methods require control groups and parallel studies from dated materials. Should we examine weapons and regalia in other epics? The Æneid? The Psychomachia? Claudian? The Anticlaudianus? Are these different epic poets’ treatments of weapons markedly different? And what of the Waltharius poet and more pregnant or symbolic weapons? The ekphrasis of a shield or Pallas’ fatal belt? Does his failure to use weapons as symbols and crucial plot mechanisms as did the great epic poets condemn him as a clunky Germanic weapons wonk?⁵

I mean, did you get the phrase, “clunky Germanic weapons wonk” in your breakfast reading? To whom else could we go for this stuff? But anyway. There was a second point. As I say, everyone here is engaged in trying to find truth in fiction, or at least, in records of misapprehension. It comes down to, “is the author right or wrong?” Now, maybe this is me hanging out in the wrong places but it seems to me that this approach needs, well, theorising. Because, you know, surely this is an area where literary criticism and investigation has something to tell us, the investigation and criticism of literature? Even if we want to know something as old-fashioned as ‘what was the author doing here’ there are more sophisticated, if perhaps less scientific, ways of proceeding than comparison to known historical data. All of the authors do have some discussion of the method and effect of the author’s choice of words and literary tactics, especially Martínez but the others too, but I would like to see some readings of these sources inspired by more wide-ranging approaches and I wonder then if the questions we would ask would throw some extra light on these ones.

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1. Paul Edward Dutton, “Observations on Early Medieval Weather in General, Bloody Rain in Particular”, in Jennifer R. Davis & Michael McCormick (edd.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 167-180; Joaquín Martínez Pizarro, “The King Says No: On the Logic of Type-Scenes in Late Antique and Early Medieval Narrative”, ibid. pp. 181-192; Jan Ziolkowski, “Of Arms and The (Ger)man: Literary and Material Culture in the Waltharius“,⁶ ibid. pp. 193-208; Danuta Shanzer, “Representations and Reality in Early Medieval Literature”, ibid. 209-215.

2. Dutton, “Observations on Early Medieval Weather”; Shanzer, “Representations and Reality”, p. 211.

3. Martínez Pizarro, “The King Says No”; Shanzer, “Representations and Reality”, pp. 212-214; cf. Allan Scott McKinley, “Personal motivations for giving land to the church in the eighth century? The case of Wissembourg” in idem, Martin Ryan & Jonathan Jarrett (edd.), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic: history from charters and charter critique (forthcoming).

4. Ziolkowski, “Of Arms and the (Ger)man”, p. 203.

5. Shanzer, “Representation and Reality”, p. 215.

6. I wish he hadn’t used the pomo brackets though; anyone who gets the joke at all doesn’t need them.

 

“All the gold I could eat”: Staffordshire hoard of Anglo-Saxon weapon fittings

Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount from the Staffordshire Hoard

As mentioned previously, fabulous things have been coming out of the English soil just lately, the 1500+ gold and silver items that is being called the Staffordshire hoard and reckoned a more important find than the Sutton Hoo boat burial, and two things have been written about them that you may not have spotted yet. First off, one of my two favourite Mercia pundits to drink with, Alex Burghart, has managed to get some wise word on the subject into the Times Literary Supplement as you can see here. I don’t entirely agree with Alex’s reading, however, and in fact as Cliopatria’s official early medievalist I had already supposed I ought to try there to piece together some more of the story behind the deposition of these marvellous objects. So I had a go in this post and it occasioned debate. In either case, you may like to go and see…

 

Stock take, part IV: o but these are just taking up house room and brain space

Right, this has gone on too long, which is more or less the point of the thread indeed but the time has come to wrap it up and make some pledges. Because, you see, I have a bunch of papers kicking around that are finished, ready to submit, in fact in some cases have been submitted and come back unloved, but this doesn’t mean I’m throwing away that research. No: these should be out there working for me and gosh-darnit I intend that they shall go out once more. There is no room in the 2-up, 2-down of my brain for academic output that has now fully grown to be lounging on the mental sofa eating crisps and claiming there’s no journals to apply to for work. Get out! I shall name and shame them.

The Romanesque cathedral of Urgell, from Wikimedia Commons

1. Oldest first: “Bishop and Brother: kindred and Church in an early medieval noble family”. This was a part of the thesis that kept getting cut. Never quite essential enough to make the grade, I gave about half of it as my first ever Leeds paper and then bound it as an appendix to my thesis to try and counterbalance the fact that I’d hardly considered the Church. At least, it seemed that way at the time but really, on rewriting stuff for the book it seemed to me that really, there was quite a lot of Church in it and I’m not sure why I was worried. Anyway. The other half of it is summarised in the book, but the two halves still belong together because the original catch was just that: it’s about Bishop Sal·la of Urgell and his brother Viscount Bernat of Conflent, who around the year 1000 are easily visible collaborating as a family to maximise their wealth and power but who use completely different tactics to achieve their individual aims. The point is a contrast of lay and clerical modes of power, and all it needs, I am convinced, with a couple of recent articles on related people assimilated at least, is a rewrite to make that agenda louder and then I have two journals in mind for it, one UK and one actually in Catalonia. I would like it to go the latter more because it would get me seen by the people in my actual field but it goes to the former first because that will get me seen by people who might hire me. Next time, Catalonia, next time.


The three papyrus Bulls recording the promotion of Archbishop Ató of Osona

2. OK, next up. “Archbishop Ató of Osona: false metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica”. I first gave a version of this at a conference in 2003, and the first proper write-up some time in the next year after I’d learnt a lot more about papyri, which feature heavily. I have given about half of it here as a blog post, but only half. The trouble is, it’s huge. I sent it to a journal Gesta knows well a while ago and they came back saying “we like it but you need to cut it by half, somehow” and the reviewer was quite snippy about what bits weren’t contributing anything. If I’d cut everything he suggested, though, half the point would have been gone. So I consulted Professor McKitterick and she suggested an entirely different journal which would probably have it uncut. And then, to my great shame, I didn’t get round to it. Right, well, that’s enough of that. I have made a rapid attempt to check for related work, believe that I have found the most obvious examples and this one will now be next out the door, before even the Leeds papers book paper item because all it needs is formatting and submitting. Now, given its size that’s still no negligible task but it is stupid that I have not done this and I hereby pledge that this will end.


Sant Andreu de Gurb, home in its previous incarnation to the parchments of Adalbert of Taradell and family; photograph by the author

3. “Documents that shouldn’t survive: preservation from before the archive in Catalonia and elsewhere”. This was put together in something of a hurry for Leeds 2008 and turned out to be one of my better papers even if I fluffed the delivery somewhat. Several people told me I should publish it forthwith as it’s important, or so they think, and suggested some very high-profile journals they thought I should try. And there’s really only two things I need to read for it and they’re both short, or at least the parts of them that need reading are short. But I can’t, because it’s based on Lay Archives work and I’ve been asked quite firmly not to do anything with that work, at least until the project itself has managed to publish. But because I have so much else that needs finishing, though it grates me I see no point in causing an upset by pursuing this until all concerned parties agree that I can.


1176 copy of the 945 foundation charter of Sant Pere de les Puelles

4. “Legends in their Own Lifetime? The Late Carolingians and Catalonia”. Mentioned already, born out of the twin wombs of “The Continuation of Carolingian Expansion” and “The Identity of Authority” fertilised by the pressing need to come up with something for last year’s Haskins Society conference. This actually turned out to be a good paper, or so I thought, and on good advice I got a professor who’d been there to critique it for me. Now all I have to do is revise according to his criticisms and send it off. Furthermore, a high-end journal already saw a version of this back when it was still basically “Continuation” in argh 2006 and they came back with a friendly revise-and-resubmit, which I should therefore have done straight away and maybe I’d have a job now. But I didn’t, because I wasn’t happy with it and it wouldn’t have been as good as I wanted. Now, this version is that good, so I think the first thing to do is to send it back to the same journal and see if they want it still. Failing that, another journal has actually asked me for it, so if its first home no longer has space or interest, they shall get their wish. This is another easy score and it will therefore go into third place on the list of shame, because I really don’t have an excuse for not having it done by now.


You may be bored of this charter by now but I never will be

5. Lastly the newest: “Nuns, Signatures and Literacy in late-Carolingian Catalonia”. Fresh from delivery, this one of course has a home, and when I say it’s finished I mean that I think it could be printed as it is and it would shame no-one involved. However, there is actually a lot more work on nuns in early medieval Spain than I have read, and I want to take Wendy Davies’s advice from my viva and make sure it’s in my thinking before I submit the final version. So perhaps it should have been in the previous version, as all the relevant reading is currently on my desk but there’s still a fair whack of it. Nonetheless, I intend finishing this one very soon, because I have done enough things for Professor McKitterick rather too late and by halves and this will not be another of them.

So, er, I make that fourteen papers I have in some sort of form without having done enough to get them published, and that’s ignoring the fact that I was contemplating a second book… This is really not helping me. There is a point of view that says that one can’t actually drop everything one’s working on to concentrate on one at a time and to do so would make me unhappy, it’s true. But this is just stupid.

There is a need for a resolve of sorts. So, here is my pledge. I will revise, format and submit “Archbishop Ató”. I will do all the necessary reading for “Uncertain Origins” and make sure that it isn’t me who is holding up the Leeds volume. I will try and do both of these in the next three months, but I won’t promise the timing because of now being teaching and having other papers in final stages, book about to reach proofs and so on. However, I will do it at the earliest feasible point. Then I will revise and submit “Legends” and then I will concentrate on “Succession to the Fisc” until delivery time and then we’ll see what happens next.

 

I am beginning to see a trend here

I knew this would happen. The more of Michel Zimmermann’s huge thèse I read, the less likely I get to be able to conduct a civil conversation with him, even though I learn a lot as well. If I had to sum this difference of perception up, I would usually say that I find it difficult to believe as easily in the influence of the people who request charters made in what the scribes then write, especially when it comes down to word choice. But here I am also coming up against a broader issue which I suppose is just down to how huge the pile of evidence we share is. This problem is, Professor Zimmermann is revelatory about what one can see in the vast Catalan charter material, but I can often fault him when he asserts that something cannot be found in the material. Assertions of evidentiary silence when there’s so much background noise are always going to be risky.

An exchange between Count Borrell II and the monks of Santa Maria de Ripoll, 957, large image linked beneath

For example. Zimmermann, in a really interesting chunk about whether people really do sign their own names in these documents, who they are when they do (almost always clerics, unsurprisingly, but not always) and so forth, notes that even if the signatories to a charter can’t write, they may be able to draw a signum, a graphical device loosely based on a cross in a circle or on a triple S (from subscripsit), and you can see a few above.¹ Sometimes the scribe draws those too and the people just draw one of the dots in the angles of the cross: he says this can be seen in several documents but doesn’t reference them dammit.² But he also says that people start to mark themselves out by individualised signa in the twelfth century (as with the notaries’ marks we talked about a while back), but not before.³ Well, er, what about the above one? And what indeed about that charter by the nuns of Sant Joan that has featured here so often? There’s at least eight different signa on that. Why don’t they count?⁴

Yes, here it is again, but you see the signa, right? Large version beneath

Now I suspect the answer is simply that Zimmermann, when he was doing this work, didn’t read in the original what was already edited. He does cite a few documents from the edition of the Sant Joan charters and a few from Vic, which are the two corpora I know best and know twit his generalisations here (because they have excellent, if sparingly allocated, plates, and of course I’ve seen a few of the real things too).⁵ But because they were already edited when he was working, I imagine he didn’t do the same kind of painstaking archive work on them. Neither did I of course, but because I was so far away from them I made extra sure I’d read the palæographical notes. Anyway. So there’s my nuns with their variety and he doesn’t seem to know. And in fact he doesn’t seem to know much about nuns at all:

… toute une catégorie de religieux, les moniales en l’occurrence, reste étrangère à la culture écrite.

I’ll translate:

… a whole category of religious, to wit, nuns, remained strangers to written culture.

Now he justifies this by reference to the nuns of Sant Pere de les Puelles de Barcelona, pointing out that between 986 and 996 they frequently appear in transactions and not only do they not sign but even the abbesses don’t, once or twice having the scribe profess their inability to do so!⁶ Well, okay, and it’s not like nunneries are thick on the ground in this period (there are three in the whole of Catalonia, though a fair few female religious in other contexts), but if that’s the period you’re looking at then Sant Pere is the wrong one to pick, because it had been sacked and its population captured as slaves in 985.⁷ So everyone there in 986 is a new recruit, even the abbess, who may be a comital daughter (of Count-Marquis Borrell II, as it happens; small world innit) but she cannot have been more than 18; Borrell and his wife only married in 967, and there’s no indication that Adelaide Bonafilla was their oldest child though she could have been; the oldest son was only born in 972.⁸ Okay, old enough to have been schooled but far from a senior ecclesiastic. It’s not like there are very many charters featuring the Sant Joan nuns but they do exist (and he knows they do, because he mentions one of them giving a Psalter to a church; strangers to written culture my foot).⁹ Did he just not look through the small print in Udina’s edition closely enough? Well, maybe, but one further quote has me meanly suspecting another explanation:

… Guischafredus, auteur d’une donation commune avec sa femme Eilo en 955, tient à préciser que seule la maladie l’empêche de souscrire. De crainte sans doute d’être confondu avec sa femme dans la même inaptitude!

Not without distaste, I translate:

… Guiscafred, actor in a donation made in common with his wife Elo in 955, makes sure to specify that only frailty prevents him from subscribing, doubtless for fear of being confused with his wife in the same ineptitude!

« Sans doute », Prof. Z.! I mean, isn’t that the first possibility that occurs to you, dear reader? No? No, me neither. I think it’s supposed to be funny, but I wouldn’t have let it go to the printers myself.¹⁰ It leaves me wondering whether three pages in twelve hundred on women and repeated denials of nuns’ ability to write should really be put down to missing some key charters, or whether there’s a more basic problem here.

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1. Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IX^e-XII^e siècle), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, I pp. 86-91. The charter is printed in (and scanned from) Federico Udina Martorell (ed.), El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los Siglos IX-X: estudio crítico de sus fondos, Textos 18/Publicaciones de le Sección de Barcelona 15 (Madrid 1951), doc. no. 139.

2. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, I p. 89.

3. Ibid., I pp. 89-90.

4. The nuns’ charter is Udina, Archivo Condal, doc. no. 128, but I mentioned that already.

5. Edited in Udina, Archivo Condal, and Eduard Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles IX i X, ed. R. Ordeig i Mata (Vic 1980-1996), 5 fascs.

6. Zimmermann, Érire et lire, I pp. 82-83.

7. And of course Zimmermann wrote the basic synthesis on that event, so knows this perfectly well: “La prise de Barcelone par al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historiographie catalane” in L’Historiographie en Occident du V^e au XV^e siècle. Actes du Congrès de la Soci´té des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur. Tours, 10-12 juin 1977, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest Vol. 87 (Rennes 1980), pp. 191-218.

8. The family is set out by Prosper de Bofarull y Mascaró, Los Condes de Barcelona Vindicados, y Cronología y Genealogía de los Reyes de España considerados como Soberianos Independientes de su Marca (Barcelona 1836, repr. 1990), vol. I online at http://www.archive.org/details/loscondesdebarce01bofauoft, last modified 10 Jul. 2008 as of 15 Jan. 2009, I pp. 64-81; Borrell had Udina, Archivo Condal, doc. no. 173, additionally dated by the birth of his son, so I guess he was relieved. They do seem to have had a lot of girls.

9. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, I p. 500, referring to Udina, Archivo Condal, doc. no. 160.

10. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, I p. 82.