I will probably have to approach from the ground

Sant Pere de Casserres viewed from the air

I may have given a paper on the place but I haven’t yet been there; it’s not terribly accessible and its archives are no longer on site. I will, though. Just that, as I say, I won’t be coming from this angle…

I traditionally give an abstract of my papers here when they’re presented and I see no reason to make a difference this time; I will have to do more archive work before it can head for a print queue, although I hope it will survive that process fairly well. Here you are:

How To Take Over An Archive: Sant Pere de Casserres And Its Community

In 1006 a monastery was established on a rock in a Catalan river by a dowager viscountess. Before she obtained the alod on which the house was founded, there had been there a mother-church whose documents barely survive. An examination of the monastery’s parchments however reveals a major preliminary effort to adopt and reshape the church’s history, a process in which its clerics seem to have been complicit and its documents rewritten. This paper teases the process out of the texts and uses them to question conventions of documentary interpretation.

It’s good, I think, if slightly familiar.