Models of marriage 
charters in a notebook of Ademar of Chabannes 
(ninth- to eleventh-century)

Charters are very valuable sources for historians interested in social and cultural history: they convey a great deal of varied information. In addition to charters – whether kept as an original or copied in a cartulary – another kind of document is an important source of information: the so-called formulae, that is anonymized models for writing charters or letters. The formula written by Ademar could be the copy of a real charter of the first half of the ninth century which was based on the formula kept in the Vatican manuscript, which is itself an adaption of a model from the Tours collection. The ‘Ademarian’ formula fit into the ideology of the monastic reform of the era, but topics that they consider are much older, as one can see with the example of a formula of the Bourges collection.