Professor Yvonne Seale talks recently published book
On Oct. 27, 2023, in the depths of Welles 26, Dr. Yvonne Seale, Associate Professor in History, gave a presentation concerning The Cartulary of Prémontré, a manuscript that herself and co-editor Dr. Heather Wacha had been transcribing, ordering, formatting, and editing for around seven years. It hit the public this past June through the University of Toronto Press, and boasts a staggering 1016 pages which consist of 509 different charters with additional notes and apparatus.
Seale has been a professor here at SUNY Geneseo since 2016 and over her years in doctoral studies and professorship she has published 10 other peer reviewed articles. She also runs the social media for the History Department and this year had the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching bestowed upon her. Her focus is in medieval studies, particularly the lives and actions of women during this time and the social aspects of medieval religion.
A cartulary is a way of recordkeeping in the medieval times and often was a series of transcribed versions of original documents that held an elevated significance to the larger institution it served such as donations, prayers, exchanged goods, and much more. The Cartulary of Prémontré in particular was a book that belonged to a monastic group in the north of France in the Prémontré region presumably in the late 12th century into the 13th. The original cartulary was written entirely in Latin as well as in two medieval French dialects and contained around 200,000 words in total.
Seale felt drawn to this work in particular because she felt that despite the popularity of this specific French region in medieval studies, there was close to zero academic work done of this particular text, particularly when it is of such medieval significance. The most recent dive into The Cartulary of Prémontré Seale could find was from the 1880s. She sees books as a form of technology, especially when the time period of her studies is considered, and finds that any piece of writing has a certain degree of importance that is imbued upon it due to the laborious process that writing in medieval times was.
In her talk, Seale breaks the process of editing down into three separate stages. The starting stage was that of transcription; this was a process that would take her and Wacha around two years, and the discovery of the maximum word count a Google Doc allows (1.2 million) to complete. Some of the technical aspects of this process include an assessment of the scribe’s handwriting and how it might change over time, or because the scribe might change. Different eras present different kinds of handwriting is most ideal, and Seale provides a baseline of some of the major eras of medieval handwriting with Unical, Beneventum, and Proto Gothic. Another aspect that modern readers might not consider is the barrier of discerning medieval shorthand.
The second stage of this process focused upon attempting to find original copies of any of the documents found in the cartulary. It provided the editors with a vital opportunity to fill in the gaps on pages that might have been damaged as the years passed, and become further acquainted with “their scribe” in terms of how true to the original document they tended to be when copying it over into the cartulary and how often they might have omitted, condensed, or missed information on a given original document. This process took. Seale and Wacha to a litany of locations both inside of and outside of France with original copies of the cartulary’s documents being found in Belgium, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, and many other European countries.
Lastly came the question of how exactly should the pair format and organize this edition of The Cartulary of Prémontré. This was a paramount consideration, in part because of how long it takes to write this sort of manuscript, meaning this edition of the cartulary will most likely be the one scholars rely upon for many decades. With this in mind Seale and Wacha made some unorthodox decisions. They decided they would make sure to include mistakes made by the scribe(s) in the text while still correcting them and pointing out where documents might have been damaged in the original cartulary, but could be transcribed due to the editors acquiring the source document itself. They also would re-add in individuals who have been condensed into an “etcetera” when being listed, partly because these individuals were often women. With more minute details like this agreed upon and more macro aspects like order of pages finalized, the book was finally able to be published and brought out into the public eye.