ABSTRACT
This citation from Brigitte Bedos-Rezak is a reminder to us that we historians should not content ourselves with simply using ‘sources’. 2 We must analyze not only how these ‘sources’ were created, but also why they have been preserved, which brings me to the notion of ‘archives’. We must, in other words, historicize the documents and archives we use. Infl uenced by contributions from anthropology, this approach owes a great deal to research on written culture in the broadest sense, from which we get the notion of ‘literacy’ in English and scripturalité in French. 3 Nonetheless, faced with a concept as broad as that of ‘literacy’, medievalists needed to fi nd a qualifi er to refer to the multiple forms of writing that served practical purposes (for example fi nancial, juridical, or administrative). Thus, the term ‘pragmatic literacy’ was born, termed pragmatische Schriftlichkeit in German and écrit documentaire in French. 4
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries experienced a proliferation of different uses of writing to such an extent, in fact, that the written word was at the centre of social relationships and even of ‘everyday practices’, to use the title of the conference Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter. 5 Yet, while we may be able to speak of a ‘revolution’ in terms of the kinds and numbers of documents that proliferated during that period, the High Middle Ages also witnessed what can be termed a ‘conservation revolution’. 6
Focusing on Provence, the purpose of this chapter is to show how the military orders participated in this twofold revolution. Provence constitutes an excellent region for investigation. Facing the Mediterranean and offering direct maritime
7 the beginning of the twelfth century for the Hospital and since the 1130s for the Temple. By the 1220s, both had established a dense network of commanderies in the region. Most of the brothers came from local elite families, which contributed to the deep integration of the two orders within local societies. The social and spiritual appeal of these orders explains why the Temple and the Hospital remained the most infl uential religious orders in Provence until the arrival of the Mendicants. Consequently, both orders produced numerous documents of all kinds, many of which were preserved for very specifi c reasons by the archivists of the Order of Malta. 8
Although the history of Provence during the early medieval period is somewhat clouded by the relative scarcity of surviving documents, during the twelfth century the region’s history comes to light thanks to the large number of texts produced by bishops and chapters but above all by the military orders. Historians of medieval Provence have largely drawn on the collections of the Temple and the Hospital. 9 The cartularies produced by the two orders have enabled scholars to document population groups like knightly families and allod-holders who had begun to ascend the social and economic ladder from the twelfth century onwards. 10 That the military orders’ archives in Provence survived in the variety and excellent condition they did was no coincidence, however, but rather results from the fact that their proliferation coincided with the spread of notaries in southern France starting in the middle of the twelfth century. 11 Moreover, new legal and administrative practices that developed during the thirteenth century helped contribute to the survival of these archives. 12 Yet in the end, the preservation and diversity of Templar and Hospitaller archives in Provence also results from the close attention paid by the orders themselves to the production and conservation of their documents.
