Mark Mersiowsky,. (Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica 60). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015. Pp. 1,113. €148. ISBN: 978-3-447-10079-3.
The author presents us with a work of high ambition, great originality, and durable significance. The book draws on the work of scholars as different as Gerd Althoff and Geoffrey Koziol on the one hand and Theodor von Sickel and Harry Bresslau on the other. It is dense and long. Its minutely detailed argumentation and meticulous documentation make it impossible to summarize in the space of a review.
The book turns around a closely related set of methodological and conceptual premises. Traditional diplomatic, Mersiowsky argues, has always focused on the formal characteristics of documents and has emphasized methods of ascertaining authenticity and forgery. Moreover, diplomas and charters have been seen essentially as texts that contain concrete legal and administrative information. Diplomatic has been the partner of constitutional history. Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift in how rulership is understood. Rulership is now seen as a complex process involving debate, discussion, coercion, cooperation—in short, politicking. Mersiowsky argues convincingly that "[b]ehind every document stood ceremonial steps, forms of publication, effective social networks, and practices of social intercourse" (
Mersiowsky's basic approach, after a long historical and methodological introduction, is to look at original "Herrscherurkunden" and private charters. He proceeds both chronologically and regionally for reasons I shall come to. He argues that printed editions—where they exist—facsimiles, and photocopies cannot satisfactorily answer the questions he wishes to pose. He stresses the urgent need for digital images if the field and all its rich possibilities are to be advanced in the future. Even so, and although he omits the British Isles, Mersiowsky's labors will strike every reader as astonishing. Not astonishing, but deeply satisfying, are Mersiowsky's repeated historiographical interludes. He describes fully and fairly the development of scholarship on every one of his subtopics (see his subtitle). These sections are not merely descriptive, however. Mersiowsky actively engages with his material and honestly signals questions in suspense and possible paths for future scholarship. Every early medievalist must read this book, and it will be of both help and inspiration to all those scholars who work on documents, rulership, administration, government, the state, and politics. This is, quite simply, one of the most important books I have read in years.
Mersiowsky patiently builds up a case that documents reveal power, prestige, and performance; that they are central features of the practice and symbolic representation of rulership; and that they reveal strategies and practices of communication. He begins by looking at the original diplomas of the Carolingian rulers from 751 to 911. The 780s and 790s, a period of great change in the Frankish world, saw the emergence of a "canonical" matrix in Charlemagne's diplomas. This matrix persisted through the reigns of Louis Pious and Lothar I. Amid upheavals in the East Frankish realm, Louis the German consciously developed a new matrix. Charles the Bald simply moved away from the old matrix without developing a new one. As the capacity and responsibilities of late Carolingian rulers diminished, their diplomas departed more and more from the classic high-Carolingian matrix. What emerges for the diplomas, then, is the development and promulgation of a coherent and universal ruling ethos, followed by the development of a new one or else by the abandonment of the old universalizing ideals.
Mersiowsky then looks at other traditions of "Herrscherurkunden"—Byzantine, papal, and Lombard—before turning to private documents. The other kinds of rulers' documents had no discernible impact on Carolingian documents, and the Carolingians exerted only a limited influence on Lombard documents. Private documents, a nineteenth-century stopgap term for documents not issued by kings, emperors, or popes, tended to follow regional patterns. Very rarely did the Carolingian matrix influence private documents, which followed their own local evolutionary path away from late Roman practices. After general reflections on the private documents, Mersiowsky breaks down the discussion into an examination of ecclesiastical and secular documents. Only Italian materials and documents preserved at St. Gall permit some insight into whether or not there was an episcopal matrix. By the late ninth century, however, synods began to issue beautiful and highly distinctive records of their deliberations. The majority of secular documents were issued by counts. They tended to hew to local traditions with the exception of south Italian documents that reflect strivings for political independence. Despite some attention to authentication devices and other marks of solemnity, private documents never exhibit the "corporate identity" of rulers' or papal documents.
After his lengthy discussion of documentary practices, Mersiowsky turns to processes of communication. He has a great many interesting things to say about the place of writing in Carolingian culture (indeed "Schriftlichkeit" has been a topic of intense discussion for about thirty years) but he argues that the preparation of a written document was always only one in a series of oral and performative steps usually taken at court. Let me focus on just one aspect of Mersiowsky's discussion: initiative. Not surprisingly, traditional diplomatic saw diplomas as expressions of the authority, power, and rights of rulers. Mersiowsky demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of surviving diplomas are confirmations. Hence recipients are at least as important as issuers. Mersiowsky uses the diplomas themselves and other sources when possible to learn what he can about the deliberations at court that resulted in the issuance of a diploma. The existence of a diploma indicates a successful outcome, but there must have been failures. The repeated confirmation of earlier grants says something about both the continuing legitimacy of rulers and the continuous recourse to their authority. Documents were not presented and re-presented at court merely to prove things, although they did that. Instead, they asserted and preserved relationships. To show how they worked, Mersiowsky sets up a typology of diplomas and then takes the reader through each type in terms of its preparation and its social and political roots. In the end, he returns briefly to the concerns of traditional diplomatic with rulers and says that diplomas do show us the royal will at work attempting to shape and even to change reality.
A nice little chapter on what can be known about Carolingian archival practices precedes a crisp eleven-page summary of the work. I would urge readers to read the first 53 pages of the book, the historical background, and then read the final summary so as to have a clear sense of the long journey on which Mersiowsky is going to take them.
A few critical reflections, really scribbles in the margin, come to mind. Pages 1,097 to 1,106 contain an "Abbildungsverzeichnis" that runs to 272 items. But there are no plates in the book. Mersiowsky refers his readers to reproductions. Properly to read this book, one must be sitting at a big table in a well-stocked library. The visual dimension is repeatedly crucial to what Mersiowsky is attempting to accomplish. In his section on archives Mersiowsky admits that documents were virtually never seen by anyone. This seems to me to call into question his idea, borrowed basically from Hanna Vollrath, that documents reflect authority without physical presence. Koziol has in recent work stressed the performative nature of documents. Mersiowsky takes a different approach. He thinks of the whole scene where the document was requested, discussed, prepared, and conferred. Here is his "communication." Still, the links between those scenes and the surviving documents are tenuous. Near the end, Mersiowsky calls for a close investigation of, so to speak, the geography of communication: where a document was issued, to whom it was issued, the location of the properties it referenced. This is precisely the approach taken in 1980 by Eckhard Müller-Mertens and in slightly different terms by Rosamond McKitterick in 2008, neither of whom are mentioned. Despite putting diplomatic and rulership into motion, Mersiowsky has a slightly static sense of court. Finally, the book is repetitive. Some examples crop up again and again albeit, in fairness, they tend to do different work each time they appear. But one feels a bit Lilliputian nipping at the ankles of the Gulliverian Mark Mersiowsky.
By Thomas F. X. Noble