Understanding Scotland's medieval cartularies

Abstract

The medieval cartulary is well known as a major source for documents. This article takes Scotland as a case study for examining how the understanding of medieval cartularies has been shaped by those works extensively used by researchers to access cartularies and their texts – in a Scottish context this is principally the antiquarian publications and modern catalogues. Both pose their own problems for scholars seeking to understand the medieval cartulary. After an in-depth examination of these issues, a radical solution is offered which shifts the attention onto the manuscripts themselves. Such an approach reveals those extant cartularies to be fundamentally varied, and not an exclusive ‘category’ as such. This in turn allows historians to appreciate the dynamic nature of cartularies as sources for documents, and to eschew the deeply embedded tendency to see the cartulary simply as a copy of a medieval archive.

Asking for forgiveness as an aspect of crusade

“…It is worth bearing in mind that there is no crusader for whom records have survived in totality, which give a complete picture of their preparations (Lloyd 1988: 154;Tyerman 1988: 189). Indeed, as with all surviving European charters, Scottish cartulary evidence does not necessarily present unaltered facsimiles of original medieval records (Tucker 2019). That said, reading these sources through the prism of texts like that of Jean de Joinville helps to highlight Scottish nobles' appreciation for wider Latin Christian approaches towards crusade preparation -particularly the focus on the settling of feuds and legal quarrels.…”