What is "cartulary"

Cartulary \Car"tu*la*ry\, n.; pl. Cartularies. [LL. cartularium, chartularium, fr. L. charta paper: cf. F. cartulaire. See 1st Card.]

1. A register, or record, as of a monastery or church.

2. An ecclesiastical officer who had charge of records or other public papers.

n. 1 (context ecclesiastical English) A register, or record, as of a monastery or church. 2 (context ecclesiastical English) An ecclesiastical officer who had charge of records or other public papers.

A cartulary or chartulary (, Latin: cartularium or chartularium), also called pancarta or codex diplomaticus, is a medieval manuscript volume or roll ( rotulus) containing transcriptions of original documents relating to the foundation, privileges, and legal rights of ecclesiastical establishments, municipal corporations, industrial associations, institutions of learning, or families. The term is sometimes also applied to collections of original documents bound in one volume or attached to one another so as to form a roll, as well as to custodians of such collections.

The allusion of Gregory of Tours to chartarum tomi in the 6th century is commonly taken to refer to cartularies. The oldest surviving cartularies, however, originated in the 10th century. Those from the 10th to the 13th centuries are very numerous.

Cartularies frequently contain historical texts, known as cartulary chronicles, which may focus on the history of the monastery whose legal documents it accompanies, or may be a more general history of the world. This link between legal and historical writings has to be understood in the context of the importance of past events for establishing legal precedence.

Generally speaking, a cartulary attested by the signatures or marks of a number of prominent individuals ranks as a public document possessing greater value than a private letter or the narrative of an annalist.

Sometimes the copyist of the cartulary reproduced the original documents with literal exactness. On the other hand, some copyists took liberties with the text, including modifying the phraseology, modernizing proper names of persons and places, and even changing the substance, so as to extend the scope of the privileges or immunities granted in the document. The value of a cartulary as a historical document depends not only on how faithfully it reproduces the substance of the original, but also, if edited, on the clues it contains to the motivation for those changes. These questions are generally the subject of scrutiny under well-known canons of historical criticism.

No complete inventory of the cartularies of the various institutions of the Middle Ages exists, but many cartularies of medieval monasteries and churches have been published, more or less completely. The Catalogue général des cartulaires des archives départementales (Paris, 1847) and the Inventaire des cartulaires etc. (Paris, 1878–9) were the chief sources of information regarding the cartularies of medieval France. For the principal English (printed) cartularies, see Gross, Sources and Literature of English History, etc. (London, 1900), 204–7 and 402–67. The important cartulary of the University of Paris was edited by Father Denifle, O.P., and M. Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis (Paris, 1889, sqq). There may be more recent developments in cataloguing.