ABSTRACT
Formularies are collections of specimen documents intended to serve as models in the composition of new pieces. Thus their purpose was often severely practical, and they might be grouped with legal texts or with the deeds they helped to draft. Their value to the social historian is twofold. The Salzburg formularies contain such material, and it is difficult to believe that the late tenth-century letters from the monastery of Tegernsee could have had a narrowly utilitarian purpose, although they might have assisted in the literary formation of monastic scholars. The Salzburg account of the conversion of the Bavarians and the Slavic Carinthians is a tendentious history written in the later ninth century to assert Salzburg's claims to jurisdiction over missionary lands in the east. Moreover, Tacitus wrote his 'Germania' with a conservative intent: to hold up the mirror of the 'noble savage' to contemporary Roman society.
