The Memory of Past Acts: Picturing Presence, Loss, and History in Illuminated Cartularies, c. 1050-1220

For much of the Middle Ages, agreements over properties, rights, and obligations were recorded on individual sheets of parchment. Cathedrals, monasteries, and royal chanceries accumulated hundreds of such records, or charters. Increasingly by the eleventh century these institutions took to recopying them into manuscripts, or cartularies. Copied collections of legal agreements would not seem to invite decoration or embellishment; yet around three dozen illuminated cartularies survive from the period from around 1050 to 1220.

This book offers the first sustained analysis of some thirty surviving such works from across western Europe and their highly inventive imagery. The brilliantly colored illuminations depict miracles, royal power, and, most strikingly, images suggestive of the culture of documents and of scribal mises en abime. Scenes that set charters and various performances associated with written agreements serve to highlight memorial attitudes toward past legal acts and testify to an expansion of the visual culture of documentary practice.

The special character of cartularies as copied collections also encourages reconsideration of art history's usual iconographic pursuits. The Memory of Past Acts privileges the process of manuscript production as central to the imagery. It argues that discourses surrounding scribal and textual traditions (copying, transcribing, displacing originals, reinventing authority, writing history) not only inform the subjects depicted, but also, and more fundamentally, motivate the very inclusion of illumination, making such imagery nothing less than a meditation on past scribal acts.

Robert A. Maxwell is Sherman Fairchild Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The author of The Art of Medieval Urbanism: Parthenay in Romanesque Aquitaine (2007) and editor of Representing History, 900-1300: Art, Music, History (2010), he is also co-editor, with Kirk Ambrose, of Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Sculpture Studies (2010) and, with Manuel Antonio Castineiras Gonzalez, of a special issue of Ad Limina entitled Imagining the Road to Santiago: Itineraries, Narratives, Myths (2025). He has written widely on medieval manuscript illumination, sculpture, and architecture, as well as on the historiography of medieval art.