TO GIVE, TO ORDER, AND TO CONFIRM. THE FRENCH PRELATES' POWER IN THE WORLD OF THE 13TH CENTURY CHARTERS

Abstract

As corpora of medieval texts became available online, and platforms for textometric analysis (TXM, among others) were developed in the last decade, it has become possible to explore old historiographical issues from a new perspective. This study explores the actions of medieval dominants and the forces they used to perform those actions. The author unites a corpus of the author unites a corpus of the charters of prelates of the French dioceses from the period following the “documentary revolution”, because the general increase in the number of charters since the 12th century enables the author to work at the level of particular social groups. The charters of bishops and archbishops and the charters of abbots and abbesses of the 13th century were collected from online editions of medieval French cartularies (from the Chartae Galliae, the Cartulaires d'Île-de-France, and the Cartulaire blanc). The author generated lists of the most frequent verbs and nouns in the ablative and examined the most common adverb co-occurrences for the most frequent verbs of the two corpora. As a result of the study, a number of observations were obtained. 1) Along with the group of verbs that denote the activity of creating a charter and of disseminating the information, the most frequent verbs refer to the activities of giving, ordering and confirming in the corpus of bishops. These three main activities were distinguished by analyzing the structure of verb binomials in the corpus. 2) The activities of abbots appear to be different from those of bishops: the verbs of ordering are far less frequent, while the verbs of selling and exchanging are more common. While bishops form the dominant group within the whole society, the activities of the abbots in society are less conspicuous (abbots dominate within their monasteries). 3) The auctoritas, although an important power force that enables the majority of power actions, is not the only one used by prelates: members of the Church acted by voluntas; a large amount of actions requires consent or counsel. Finally, the promise requires the force of fides, etc. 4) The 13th century society was the one where all actions were judged as more or less spiritual, and where the less spiritual power actions and practices of the prelates were also ‘spiritualised’. Although different groups of verbs attract different kinds of adverbs (e.g. one should serve ‘honestly and devotedly’, one possesses ‘peacefully’, one commands and orders ‘firmly and rigorously’), they all have positive connotations. The charters serve to reproduce a system where the spiritual plays a dominant role and where attaining the celestial realm is the central goal of all actions (documents on the exercise of power belong to the same system as theological texts).