The Cartulary-Chronicle of St-Pierre of Bèze ed. by Constance Brittain Bouchard (review)

Reviewed by: The Cartulary-Chronicle of St-Pierre of Bèze ed. by Constance Brittain Bouchard Jennifer Paxton The Cartulary-Chronicle of St-Pierre of Bèze. Edited by Constance Brittain Bouchard. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019. Pp. xii, 448. $103.00. ISBN: 9781487506155.) Constance Brittain Bouchard is well known for her path-breaking work on medieval French monasteries and their estates. Over thirty years ago, her monograph Holy Entrepreneurs: Cistercians, Knights, and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy (Cornell, 1991) helped transform our view of monks as economic agents. The raw material for her study was monastic cartularies, which record the minute details of transactions out of which economic and social history can be written. Now Bouchard has produced a very welcome edition of the cartulary chronicle of St. Pierre of Bèze, a Benedictine house in Burgundy not far from the renowned St. Bénigne of Dijon, which has previously been little known by historians. Thanks to Bouchard, we have a rich new source that will help illuminate not just the history of this monastery but the social life of its surrounding community. In a succinct introduction, Bouchard describes the distinctive format of the cartulary, which, as the title would suggest, incorporates significant passages of narrative history into a largely chronological series of documents. The bulk of the narrative concerns the foundation of Bèze in the seventh century and its refoundation in the tenth after a series of vicissitudes visited upon the house by enemies both foreign and domestic. Bouchard expertly disentangles what is probably the compiler's self-serving guesswork (he gives the monastery an origin in 600, just a shade earlier than the neighboring–and rival–monastery of Flavigny) from plausible reconstruction (she concludes that the monastery has a genuine mid-seventh-century origin). Indeed, she rescues most of the earliest documents in the text from the charge of outright forgery and argues instead that the twelfth-century chronicler was trying sincerely to make sense of texts he did not fully understand himself. The compiler did not compose most of the narrative passages de novo. Rather, he borrowed liberally from the chronicle of St. Bénigne, which provides a national perspective on events in what would later become France and Burgundy, as the "spine" of his account. This makes sense, since St. Bénigne and Bèze were closely connected and had at one time even been ruled by the same abbot, but Bouchard points out the places in which the compiler has deftly cut and pasted in parts of the text that are relevant to his house alone; for example, he omits portions of the chronicle in which the Dijon chronicler details gifts to his own house but retains mentions of gifts to Bèze. These narrative passages are particularly important in the early history of the abbey, but the narrative context is also essential in some cases for understanding the documents the compiler provides. For example, he reproduces a passage that describes the reform of the papacy under Henry III and the accession of Pope Leo IX, whose vigorous defense of church rights extends to protecting St. Pierre of Bèze from having to pay tithes to another church, on the grounds that no church dedicated to St. Peter should be obligated to do so. The compiler thus deftly ties his house to the main current of church reform. [End Page 594] Previous editions of the text, all of which are based on a seventeenth-century antiquarian work, had picked apart the chronicle and the cartulary, but Bouchard follows the recent scholarly trend of representing the contents of a medieval manuscript as they were intended to be read by their author, namely, with narrative passages and documents deliberately intertwined. It is thus possible to follow exactly how the compiler wished those documents to be understood in the context of the history of his house. Bouchard concedes, though, "that this edition will be consulted primarily for the documents in it" (p. 17), so she helpfully numbers them. It would have been an additional welcome step if she had differentiated the narrative passages from the documents graphically; while it is usually easy to tell...

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