6 - WRITING AND POWER

Summary

The convenientia played a central role in the organization of Catalan society from the beginning of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth, but its origins are to be found earlier and farther afield, in early medieval notarial traditions. The near total absence of documents from the Visigothic kingdom, however, precludes a demonstration of the direct influence of earlier traditions, whether indigenous or external, on the eleventh-century Catalan scribes who first composed convenientiae. The documentary context in which this form first appeared was particularly rich and, by the 1020s, increasingly fluid. Toward the end of the tenth century, the strict adherence of scribes to formulae, such as those found in the highly influential formulary of Santa Maria de Ripoll, began to break down. This development was perhaps connected to the disruption caused by the sack of Barcelona in 985, but whatever the precise reason for the change, scribes began to use new terms in standard types of documents and to create entirely new documentary types. Formally, the convenientia evolved from documents concerning conditional grants, the settlement of disputes, oaths of fidelity, and castle-holding agreements.

This understanding of the development of the convenientia, rather than simply the observation of its appearance, allows for a more sophisticated model of the connections between words written on parchment and the institutions that inspired those words.