“Documentary Practices and Their Context: Memory, History, and Contemporary Concerns in the Surveys of Marmoutier and Sindelsberg.” The paper addresses an intricate balance between imagining, recording, and forging the past, and reminds of the need to examine documents in their historical context. It shows that medieval plans of Alsatian monasteries Marmoutier and its priory Sindelsberg cannot be adequately interpreted outside their cultural and political environment: for writing history where no sources were available, their authors wavered between conflicting desires to record the authentic past and to invent a history of the monastery that would help claim its lost possessions. An attempt to capture the past in this atmosphere produced a plan that was chronologically ambiguous, a plan that amalgamated bits of oral tradition and the monastery’s documentary history in an anachronistic representation. The study of Marmoutier’s plan should remind historians of the Middle Ages of the intricate balance between text and context, paleographical and diplomatic evidence, and the environment in which written evidence originates.