1. Motivation

The research projects, which fostered the development of the datasets of CarCat, intended to analyze the transformation of a periphery of the Carolingian empire between the late ninth and the middle of the eleventh century into a central region of European identity building from the viewpoint of imported and autochthonous manuscript production. The projects tried to establish the first long-term case studies that envisioned not only processes of identity building in Europe’s peripheries from the standpoint of written media, but that laid especially a strong focus on their position of cultural and religious brokerage between the multi-religious medieval Mediterranean World and Christianised Central Europe. The projects’ main objective was to ponder whether the dangers of decomposition of Europe’s unity in diversity had been fostered or curtailed by her peripheries of knowledge and learning. For this, we suggested the historical perspective on the so-called ‘decomposition’ of the Carolingian empire for a better understanding of our current political, social, and economic situation in Europe one millennium later.

The southern parts of Gallia and the north-eastern parts of Hispania offer best conditions for a comparative grasp on transformation processes in the Carolingian empire because both always formed a double-face region of ethnic, cultural and linguistic, social and political, and religious transition and brokerage between the Mediterranean and Central European World with parallel contacts to the Christian North and the Muslim South. This Mediterranean zone provides the possibility to assess the quality of ‘Carolingian’ culture as an imperial, i. e. overarching and eclectic concept of amalgamation of cultural and political semantics, not from the central, but the peripheral European perspective.

2. State-of-the-Art of Former Research

Former autochthonous and foreign research on the medieval European regions we call ‘Septimania’ and ‘Catalonia’ focused on their particular position in Visigothic and Carolingian legal and constitutional history. The rigourous positivism of twentieth-century research especially on the Carolingian and Catalan counts, their diplomatics, and the central question of medieval feudalism deepened our insights into historical evidence, but could not completely escape the interests of Catalan particularism during Franco’s nationalist regime in Spain, if not autonomy or even national independence after that, a methodological problem of many even most recent Catalan scholarship on (medieval) Catalonia.

A first turn and a step to internationalisation of research on ‘medieval Catalonia in its formation phase’ were provided by the new French socio-economic and legal history embedded into the debate of “la mutation féodale de l’an mil“ and the change of dynasties from the Carolingians to the Capetians, affecting both regions north and south of the Pyrenees, thus ‘France’ (Western Francia), ‘Septimania’ and ‘Catalonia’. The older opinion of a still ongoing vitality of Visigothic legal system up to the second quarter of the eleventh century and its abrupt end (Bonnassie) became challenged by more detailed research on specific legal documents and formations which favours now a slow process of its transformation. Rather than focusing so intensely on the specific that they neglect the general, these new studies consciously relate the societies and political structures they identify explicitly to the Carolingian empire of which they were a part and they focus more and more on micro-historical research.

Parallel to this research the more general question of a period of legal and political emancipation from northern Francia around the first millennium was combined with research on the ‘international’ family policy of the Catalan counts and the tricky question of ‘Catalan identity building’ in a society of growing competences in pragmatical and intellectual reading and writing. This focus on identity is not without problems, as it runs the risk to fall into the trap of transferring modern perspectives of Catalonia on medieval texts and constellations and thus of strengthening anachronistic ‘national’ perspectives. In awareness of this heuristically dangerous vicious circle, a more recent strand of research has focused on historical geography combined with a critical assessment of early modern historiography and later history of research on the topic of identity building in Catalonia. Research interests in this field have in the meanwhile shifted from the creation and perception of a territory of ‘Catalonia’ within the context of Carolingian and post-Carolingian expansion to the central question of the veracity and myth of Catalonia’s identity between the Middle Ages and present times.

A methodological turning point in international research on early medieval Catalonia’s history was the year 2003, which saw the publication of three monographs combining the aforementioned socio-economic and legal research with the new focus on the socio-political role of culture. Whereas the first publication is more a synthesis of former detailed research on scriptures and book culture in a ‘container’ called ‘medieval Catalonia’ than a study on whether and how these cultural phenomena of cultural transfer contributed (or not) to the stabilisation or transformation the current ecclesiastical and social formations of the regions, the second and third ones at least tried to reflect these processes. Yet these studies need a succinct methodological reframing on the basis of a larger and deepened textual, codicological and palaeographical evidence, a widening of the perspective on the relationship of ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ and last but not least a new definition of what ‘Carolingian’ virtually was, a reflection not even started in the latest monograph on ‘Catalan identity building’.

3. Method and Aims

The question of what implications ‘Carolingian’ and ‘European’ culture had on the reorganisation of the post-Carolingian empire has never been seriously asked in comparative perspective and thus not for the north-eastern parts of the Iberian Peninsula either. With regard to the welcome first comparative study on (post-)Carolingian border regions, the current state-of-the-art called for systematic research on how the cultural and religious memory had (trans)formed this region through selective production and reception of Carolingian text culture. The working hypothesis behind this perspective was that the same elite networks of lay- and churchmen who exerted power on their lands were engaged in the legitimation and stabilisation of their power through multiple media of Carolingian cultural legacy. The projects thus envisioned the transfer and production of manuscripts conceived as archives and spaces of texts, and as materialised media of identity building in a new geographic, social, cultural, and religious context. It tackled the never seriously answered question whether and how the legacy of a) various knowledge systems, b) typical text genres, and c) models of normative systems, developed in the Carolingian empire, contributed substantially to identity building in an outstanding Carolingian periphery. The rich Carolingian legacy of ‘medieval Catalonia’, already highly productive in the tenth century, but never systematically nor completely envisaged, was compared from the perspective of non-national, i. e. regional, legal, cultural and religious communities. The projects therefore intended to develop a comparative perspective on cultural strategies and forces of social and political cohesion, their success and their failure in an age of transition and transformation to what we call ‘Europe of regions’. Contributing first to the central questions of the HERA Project “After Empire”, then to those of the larger framework of global project “Transformation of the Carolingian World”, both projects asked how different pasts were used and not used to model a new landscape of centres and peripheries in post-Carolingian Europe.

The perspective of communication and collective memory in this middle ground formed by Septimania and Catalonia should not be any longer a pure act of rhetoric but a virtually accomplished work. The projects thus appraised the rich results of philological research on Carolingian text history and critical editions and discussed stemmata of text transmission – insofar already available – as channels of oral and written communication between Carolingian cultural centres and the Septimanian and Catalan peripheries of reception. Available concepts such as those of ‘manuscript migration’ to and from the Iberian Peninsula, ‘itineraries and networks of oral and written communication’ within and beyond Carolingian and post-Carolingian Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula as a ‘space of transfer and transformation’ enriched the already established master narrative of the European-wide spread of the Caroline minuscule continuously displacing regional scripts from the second quarter of the ninth century onwards. As systematic research or synthesis of Carolingian text and book culture in this periphery was not available, the projects had to take into account the complete Carolingian manuscript legacy with the purpose to identify central places of manuscript production and storage (preserved copies and testified ones through inventories, catalogues, donations and text reception) in the Catalan episcopal sees and monasteries (Urgell, Girona, Ripoll, Vic, Barcelona …) on the one hand, but also in the Septimanian background of the “ecclesia Narbonensis“ (Narbonne, Carcassonne, Aniane, Gellone …), the wider Western Frankish realm (Burgundy, Aquitaine, Loire valley …), and Italy on the other hand. New codicological and palaeographical research on the manuscripts provided chronological, geographical, and social differentiation of the legacy and thus allowed reconstructing rhythms of reception, production and perception of various texts and text genres and thus a periodisation of changing forces of identity building. This work showed that it was not sufficient to differentiate only between early juridical and liturgical reform of the Church and society and later cultural innovation in this region, but that we had to refine our picture of a multiple relationship between juridical, legal, religious and cultural legacies and their text genres in these transformation processes performed by traditional and new secular and religious groups and networks.

Yet this panorama of Carolingian transformation had also to be seen against the foil of the groundbreaking political and religious changes in Europe. The specific bipolar character of ‘medieval Catalonia’ as a buffer zone and middle ground between the core of Carolingian cultural, religious and legal systems and the Islamicate world of the Iberian Peninsula and beyond had to be taken into consideration as well. Never fully belonging to nor integrated into the Carolingian world, ‘early medieval Catalonia’ used the parallel crisis of the Empire in its Carolingian Western parts and the crumbling caliphate of Córdoba since late tenth century for political and cultural emancipation in its very moment of sovereignty (royal authority confined to the territory of “Francia”). This post-Carolingian phase of transition is characterized by ‘Catalonia’s’ parallel reorientation in a growing Europe of regions and especially towards the bishop of Rome who became more and more powerful in the pre-Gregorian reform Church. Yet the projects had to ponder if not exactly this third Mediterranean power had strengthened the region’s reorientation in Carolingian culture from the turn of the first millennium onwards.

This constellation sensitized both projects to the character, duration, and intensity of Carolingian culture in the ‘Septimano-Catalan’ and other peripheries of the Empire. How did users of the various cultural text corpora deal with the emergence of a plurality of claims about the norms governing post-Carolingian society? Meant ‘Carolingian’ always the same – since the imperial phase of the Carolingians’ rule and especially our period of missing clear administrative or legal structures and a lack of consensus about the location and nature of authority? Was ‘being Carolingian’ a concept of tolerance of cultural multiplicity? How Carolingian were ‘Septimania’, ‘Catalonia’ and the other peripheries during the long tenth century? Were there different forms of ‘Carolingian’ culture and different strategies of identity building through Carolingian texts depending on the various socio-political developments of the Empire’s peripheries? In addition, what did this mean for the transformation of the ‘Septimano-Catalan’ border region?

Both projects thus tried to reconstruct the relationship of size and weight of Carolingian and non-Carolingian (not at least Visigothic) heritage that pre-dated the Muslim conquest of the early eighth century. It intended to revise the older estimation of Carolingian culture being a homogenizing culture of unity and unification in showing that we deal with a process of selected palimpsesting of Visigothic culture, which did not touch all cultural areas. The Frankish rulers sought to balance the new cultural and political formation in this border region, i. e. to maintain secular order by allowing especially continued use of the old Lex Visigothorum and by respecting the position of local elites. Yet also central fields of religious order seemingly show a balance between Visigothic and Carolingian traditions: The imported Carolingian biblical legacy of Alcuin’s recension became mixed with Visigothic elements (esp. Isidorus of Seville) at least up to the eleventh century; in liturgy and exegesis, the Visigothic heritage (again esp. Isidorus of Seville) continued to be in use in certain religious communities, although new Carolingian-Roman traditions (e. g. Homiliary of Luculentius) tried to impose their position in the field; also little studied Carolingian exegesis in this context appeared to eliminate only some heretic religious doctrine of the former Hispanic Church (e. g. Adoptionism) than really replaced the entire rich Romano-Visigothic culture in this intellectual area. In the tenth century, Carolingian royal power faded and local secular and ecclesiastical leaders acted autonomously while paradoxically preserving the legal fiction of Carolingian sovereignty. Especially after the end of the rule of the Western Frankish Carolingians and the transition to the Capetian kings, the intensive reception of Carolingian textual heritage could have been a mode of substitution of lacking present Carolingian power in the southeastern periphery of the post-Carolingian Empire. The absence of the Carolingian king would thus have favoured or even necessitated the enforced presence of Carolingian culture.

4. The Carolingian Legacy of Medieval Septimania and Catalonia

This database presents the results of our research on Carolingian text culture of all religious institutions and individual owners belonging to the Church of Narbonne, seizeable today in manuscripts, fragments, medieval inventories and catalogues and further testimonies of text transmission and reception. Since our groundwork uncovered just weekly the unexplored richness and dissipation of this legacy, we decided to develop a first orientating list of preserved and lost testimonies which allows for showing the current state-of-the-art of national and international exploration of this specific Carolingian culture in the south-western Mediterranean world. We decided to focus on what we would call the core Carolingian text culture of the various fields of early medieval knowledge with some important restrictions: we excluded the still widely unknown, but rich biblical legacy of Septimania and Catalonia, reserved for a future project and overview, since even recent research has shown our poor knowledge of the text versions they transport so that further investigation is needed to uncover the participation of Septimanian and Catalan Latin Bible manuscripts in the edition activities of the Carolingian reform church. And we excluded also those older classical and patristic texts which were rediscovered, glossed, and commented by Carolingian scholars and thus belonged to the preferred textual patrimony of Carolingian culture as well.

Our overview offers the following structure of information: for a quick grasp of all important information, we have organized the data alphabetically, mentioning first the Carolingian author and/or work and then delivering most important data on the existing or traceable manuscripts transmission. For a dense presentation in the table all further mentions and descriptions in medieval and modern inventories and catalogues and their use for critical editions (with/out manuscript sigla) are given in footnotes. In addition to this section, we document the bibliography on the individual texts in the manuscripts as complete as possible. It goes without saying that it is currently not possible to provide complete bibliographical data for all the witnesses mentioned, as numerous other older or remote publications were discovered during the evaluation of the better-known literature and are still awaiting analysis. Nevertheless, numerous individual bibliographies on the text witnesses already document their long research history and the increasingly precise judgments of the experts. Last but not least, regional and local research, especially in Catalonia, should be acknowledged, which still receives far too little international attention, a fact that has caused many misjudgements about the places of origin and/or provenance and the datings of the manuscripts circulating in the literature, especially in English, to this day.

A special place among the manuscript researchers is occupied by Bernhard Bischoff, who, in his life’s work, made a hitherto little-noticed contribution to the study of Carolingian manuscript culture in Septimania (and Catalonia) in the ninth century, without ever publishing an own monographic study about it. We therefore contrast the manuscripts which really prove to be ninth-century products with the entries in his Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts, in order to update this repertory with new data, especially in the case of missing entries. The final data is of special importance, since it documents the links of ongoing partial or complete digitisation of our manuscript material. The ever-advancing campaigns of digitisation will force us to update and add new links in the foreseeable future.

The overview tries to be as complete as possible. However, our research in the last years has evidenced that many Septimanian and Catalan manuscripts are not stored in regional collections, but scattered since premodern times around the world in Spanish, European, and American collections which calls for more in-depth research in the future. Since we still have no census of the manuscript legacy of medieval Catalonia and Spain – comparable to the repertory published by Sigrid Krämer for medieval Germany more than 35 years ago, and since the majority of the southern French, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese medieval manuscript inventories and catalogues need professional revision and update, we certainly will find more relevant items in the (near) future. We therefore welcome further specification and information on the already-mentioned and new items.

Bellaterra, Springtime 2026

Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler MAE
ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Mòdul de Recerca A (MRA), Campus de la UAB
e-mail: matthias.tischler@icrea.cat
E – 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona)

Notes

1. D’ABADAL I DE VINYALS e. a. 1926–2020; D’ABADAL I DE VINYALS 1958; D’ABADAL I DE VINYALS 1960; LEWIS 1965; D’ABADAL I DE VINYALS 1969–1970; SALRACH I MARÈS 1978; BENET I CLARÀ 1988; Catalunya fa mil anys 1988; SALRACH I MARÈS 1988; SALRACH I MARÈS 2017. ↩
2. GUIU/PÉQUIGNOT 2006. ↩
3. BONNASSIE 1975–1976; LEWIS 1984; BONNASSIE 1990; BARRAL I ALTET e. a. 1991; UDINA I MARTORELL 1991–1992. ↩
4. “Convenientiae”: KOSTO 2001; ‘aprisio’ grants: CHANDLER 2002a; JARRETT 2010c; judicial assemblies and organisation of power: BOWMAN 2004; SALRACH I MARÈS 2004; JARRETT 2010b; SALRACH I MARÈS 2013. ↩
5. AURELL I CARDONA 1995; AURELL I CARDONA 1998b. ↩
6. ZIMMERMANN 1983; ZIMMERMANN 1989; ZIMMERMANN 2003; ZIMMERMANN 2012. ↩
7. SABATÉ I CURULL 1996; SABATÉ I CURULL 1997; SABATÉ I CURULL 2017. ↩
8. SABATÉ I CURULL 2005; SABATÉ I CURULL 2015. ↩
9. ALTURO I PERUCHO 2003a; CHANDLER 2003; ZIMMERMANN 2003. ↩
10. Yet the indigenous copies of Carolingian texts do not play a prominent role in this monograph. See also ALTURO I PERUCHO 1991a, where not even one single Catalan copy of proper Carolingian text culture is mentioned. ↩
11. The central problem of these both monographs is the fact that their authors are virtually no specialists in codicology and palaeography so that their opinions heavily depend on the sometimes outdated judgments of Catalan specialists like Anscari Mundó i Marcet or Jesús Alturo i Perucho who have often revised their opinions in more recent specialised studies not easy to appreciate because of the often hidden, regional, and scattered divulgation of their important results. Moreover, despite of its seemingly more recent date of publication, ZIMMERMANN 2003 is a slightly revised version of a PhD thesis of 1992 which has no updated bibliography. Finally, many of his qualifications on the manuscripts are given without quoting the sources (the codices themselves or studies on them) or only a random selection, not systematic and complete documentation of them, thus suppressing evidence we already dispose of. ↩
12. CINGOLANI 2015. ↩
13. STIELDORF 2012. ↩
14. Catalunya a l'època carolíngia 1999. ↩
15. DÍAZ Y DÍAZ 1988; MUNDÓ I MARCET 1988. ↩
16. Einhart’s Vita Karoli: TISCHLER 2001; Carolingian annalistic writing: TISCHLER 2006; TISCHLER 2010. ↩
17. HERBERS 2006. ↩
18. L’Islam i Catalunya 1998.↩
19. ‘Area of transition’: LINDGREN 1971; ZUCCATO 2005. ↩
20. PUIG I TÀRRECH 2003. ↩
21. However, in two prominent cases we have not drawn strict church organisational boundaries, as both religious institutions can hardly be separated from the Narbonensis, despite their affiliation to other dioceses (or metropolitan churches), due to their geographical proximity to and cultural entanglement with the Church province of Narbonne, especially discernible in their similar handwriting and book culture. This refers to the Cathedral of Albi (Church province of Bourges) and the Benedictine monastery of Saint-André-de-Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (diocese of Avignon, Church province of Arles), the manuscripts of which are taken into account here, as they show many parallel textual traditions. ↩
22. A key author in this field is Boethius whose works have a rich transmission in our zone since the ninth century. I reserve an own overview and study on this specific manuscript transmission. ↩
23. BISCHOFF 1998; BISCHOFF 2004; BISCHOFF 2014; BISCHOFF 2017. ↩
24. A tricky problem is here the hidden Catalan manuscript legacy in the large Spanish manuscript collections, especially in Madrid and El Escorial. The same holds true – although to a lesser degree – for the Septimanian and Catalan items in Paris, London, Berlin, Vatican City, and other larger and smaller international manuscript collections. These libraries deserve a new rigorous and systematic exploration from our point of view. This task will be tackled in new research projects. ↩
25. KRÄMER 1989. ↩
26. Neither France, nor Catalonia, Spain or Portugal have ever initiated the critical edition of medieval manuscript catalogues and inventories, a “national project” already begun in many other European countries in the 19th and 20th centuries (Austria, Germany, England …). In addition, the countries of the Iberian Peninsula did not participate either in the edition of the project of dated and datable medieval manuscripts, started in the 20th century in other European countries (France, Austria, Germany, England, Italy …). ↩