From letter outlines to sketches: an archiving method

Abstract

This article is about archiving medieval documents. In ancient times, as it happens nowadays, institutions and men who fleshed them out faced the requirement of preserving their written memory, but not less of keeping and processing their documents to have them available as substantiating witnesses and use them to serve various purposes and multiple functionalities. The way we shall reflect on these aspects of medieval archiving is to focus on the very peculiar case of a monastic house, the monastery of Pedroso. It happened to work in this monastery a registrar who followed a unique archiving method based on both alphabetic and ideogrammatic shelf marks. This method, although known in medieval times, was not, however, very usual. We then tried to range and classify, interpret and decode those signs or symbols, to better perceive their relevance for the archivist who wrote and sketched them on the archival fonds’ parchments of the monastery he presumptively belonged to.