Event Details

Endemic social practices and autochthonous medieval texts: the charters and condaghes of Sardinia - Lancaster Literacy Research Centre seminar with Hervin Fernandez Aceves, Lancaster University

For centuries Sardinia was nominally part of the Byzantine empire, but it became ever more isolated from the regions around it. By the late 1000s, its four independent ‘kingdoms’ – giudicati – developed as unique polities in the western medieval Mediterranean. Still little is known of the island’s socio-political dynamics during this period of apparent autonomy, except that they were unusual and precocious. It is noteworthy, despite the uncertainty, that Sardinia’s rulers developed their own local expression of social control: the production of the earliest vernacular diplomatic documents in Europe. The Sardinian charters that have survived both in external archives across the Mediterranean and in the dioceses of Cagliari, together with their own native version of a cartulary – the condaghes –, provide a fascinating insight into the Sardinian textual practices up to the twelfth century. Due to the lack of alternative local textual sources, including chronicles or any other kind of autochthonous narrative account, the actual extent of the cultural peculiarity and social implications of Sardinia’s autonomy in this period can only begin to be understood through the description and analysis of these legal and transactional documents – including their accompanying paratextual elements, such as seals and marginalia.