Inscribed metrical texts are often marginalised in the study of archaic and classical poetics. This chapter integrates examples from c. 725 to c. 450 BCE with wider practices of intertextuality, where epigrams both share techniques with other kinds of literature and have some distinctive modes of signification. Early epigrams frequently use formulas to demonstrate the adherence of a dedication or funeral to traditional norms. The apparent decline in use of glaukopis on the Acropolis after 550 BCE suggests that these formulas were not just metrically convenient: semantics mattered. Epigrams also replicate formulaic phrases from both elegy and epic with their traditional connotations intact; such connotations enrich our understanding of Phrasicleia’s epitaph (CEG 24), and of ancient epigrammatists’ conceptualisation of the relationship between oral and inscribed poetry. Inscriptions, unlike other texts, also invited interpretation against monuments situated nearby. Early dialogues of this type tend to be cooperative rather than polemical. Examples discussed include Onatas’ signatures at Olympia, the tripods at the Theban Hismenion described by Herodotus, and the relationship of the Eion herms to CEG 2–3.

This chapter works through the evidence that connects Paris 2123 and the Flavigny formulas to a real historical world; that is, the evidence that the scribes who copied the formulas understood the texts that they were copying and thought that they were important and relevant. It first takes up the evidence that connects Paris 2123 to Flavigny, and works through the manuscript’s entire contents to establish the context for the Flavigny formulas themselves. It then shows how scribes behind the Flavigny collection deliberately selected their formulas; that is, chose which to copy, which to discard, and how to arrange them, and how they merged and blended preexisting material to create the formulas that they wanted. It also demonstrates the care the scribes took in copying the formulas; that is, in organizing them and making them easy to refer to, correcting mistakes, clarifying obscure language, and so on. From this material the chapter works outwards to similar evidence in other formula manuscripts, in order to further demonstrate that the formulas are not disembodied texts, but in fact have a historical context that lets us anchor them in a real world and use them as sources to learn something about that world.

This chapter pulls together the previous chapters’ conclusions about the early medieval laity. It then asks why new, Carolingian-style formula collections stopped being made in the course of the tenth century. After surveying possible answers offered by the scholarship, it suggests – while acknowledging that we will likely never know for certain – another, namely that they continued to be produced as long as scribes wanted to write their documents and letters like others were writing theirs, for a clientele whose interests could span very long distances. As the Carolingian world disintegrated in the later ninth and tenth centuries, this became less important. The chapter closes with the history of the manuscript Paris, BNF, ms. lat. 2123, as it disappears from view, surfaces in the early modern period, arrives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and ends up in the hands of Karl Zeumer as he edited the formulas for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the MGH edition, the impact that Zeumer’s editorial methods had on the formula texts and their images of the laity, and the resulting dangers of treating this edition, rather than the surviving manuscripts, as a primary source.

This chapter introduces the formulas as a source genre and in particular the manuscript and formula collection that occupies the center of this study: Paris, BNF ms. lat. 2123 and the formulas from Flavigny. It also introduces the concepts “early medieval Europe” and “early medieval laity,” in order to frame the questions that shape the book. The chapter briefly describes how the category “lay” even came to exist; that is, how and when a category “clerical” distilled out of late and post-Roman Christian society and came by the Carolingian period to separate clergy and monks from laypeople. From there it moves into what we know about how lay people lived their lives in post-Roman and early medieval Frankish Europe, and what remains unknown that makes it worth writing a new book about. The chapter then sets the Flavigny formulas in the context of the other Carolingian formula collections, presenting it (and them) as a gateway into a different world. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the steps we need to open the gate and to understand what we see on the other side, and the topics we will explore when we get there.

This chapter tackles two principal problems with connecting the formulas to a real world: their often difficult or incorrect (by classical standards) Latin, and the late Roman and early Merovingian legal language that has led to them being labeled as antiquarian fossils. The chapter argues that the idiosyncratic Latin of the formulas in fact communicated essential content in regions where the spoken languages were evolving into Romance, as well as (with the help of glosses and occasional vernacular words) where they were Germanic. The obsolete (or obsolescent) legal language reflects a legal culture in the eighth and ninth centuries in which – especially in western areas with strong Roman roots – references to Roman law and procedure still meant something. Roman legal language gave some documents an imprimatur of authority. Descriptions of antique procedures bore a recognizable relationship (though not necessarily an exact correspondence) to how those transactions were actually carried out. In short, the legal and formulaic inheritance of Rome in the western regions of the Carolingian world contributed to a normative framework that lent authority and legitimacy both to documents and to the legal procedures that they recorded.