Courtesy of LH’s favorite archivist, Leslie Fields (e.g.), Juliane Tiemann’s “Archival Notations of the Norwegian Charter Material” (Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Vol. 12, No. 14, 2015):
Medieval Nordic charters have received increasing attention in digitization projects in recent years due to their multifaceted roles in national histories, legal traditions, and cultural practices. A charter, which is a legal document, was originally a single-leaf parchment (or paper in later periods) with a recto (hair side) and a verso or dorse (flesh side). To prevent forgery and verify the authenticity of the document’s contents, various techniques were used to add visual and material authentication, for example, in the form of seals or chirographs. Such prominent characteristics set charters apart from other types of manuscripts. Furthermore, unlike other medieval sources, these documents are typically dated and geographically located.
However, I argue that while scholarship has extensively explored the linguistic and textual contents found on the recto of these documents, as well as the historical contexts of charters, there remains a significant gap in the analysis of textual additions made by later owners of these objects. These textual additions found in the blank spaces on the dorse of these objects are largely traces of documentary and archival practices in the early modern and modern period. These practices include numbering the objects and summarizing their content, often containing multiple layers resulting from reorganization of archival materials and changes in ownership. Due to the lack of scholarship focusing on these “silent” voices in the material, their significance in understanding the complex lifecycles of historic documents held in archival repositories has been largely overlooked. These additions can contribute critical provenance information and reveal how charter materials were handled and preserved, as well as details on revisiting earlier legal matters over time. In this article, I explore this issue with a particular focus on Norwegian materials. […]
While this article primarily focuses on the dorsal notes of Norwegian charters, it draws attention to the broader implication of “silent” voices in our materials that are often undocumented in archival practices. When managing and providing access to historical collections today, it is essential to adopt a holistic approach. For medieval charters, this approach should consider not only the legal text on the recto but also the material evidence of historical interactions. By adding metadata to new and existing repositories (highlighting marginalia, annotations, and other physical traces on these single-leaf documents) we can uncover important layers of provenance and usage history within different institutional contexts that might otherwise remain hidden. Hence, there is significant potential for modern archival work to reexamine existing archival descriptions, not only enhancing accessibility but also strengthening the value of these documents for future scholarship, ensuring the continued relevance of our collections. Building on the insights of this article, I hope it encourages scholars and archivists to critically explore how dorsal notes and similar notations—through both textual and visual analysis—can contribute to our understanding of provenance, usage, and the broader history of documentary practices.
As a demi-norsk myself, I am naturally particularly interested in this material, and it taught me the word dorse (OED “The back of a book or writing”: a1641 “Without any reverse or privy seale on the dorse,” J. Smyth, Berkeley Manuscripts vol. II. 94). Thanks, Leslie!
Our own legal system still has some odd corners where physical documents are imbued with somewhat mystical power even though people blithely assume that xeroxes or pdf scans or digital-abstractions-in-the-cloud or what have you are good enough for government work. During the big mortgage crisis of 2008 and thereafter, when a lot of people who weren’t paying their debts were desperately looking for technical defenses and many mortgage-biz operators had clearly been sloppy with their paperwork and recordkeeping and some judges thought they were sleazeballs and open to ruling against them on technicalities, the nicely obscure Law French jargon word “allonge”* had a big comeback. Because if an allonge was not “firmly affixed” to the negotiable instrument it related to, it lacked mystical power to transfer the right to enforce the negotiable instrument and would thus mean the institution trying to foreclose on a mortgage didn’t have the legal right to do that. Paperclips were definitely not good enough, and this of course led to horrible wordplay in legal-profession publications like articles titled “If I Only Had a Stapler, We Could Have Gotten Allonge Better.”
(I thought of this because I think you would typically have affixed the allonge to the dorse of the instrument it went with, but I managed to avoid actually working on disputes like this personally, so I could be wrong about that.)
*”Allonge” separately is apparently a technical jargon word in fencing, but I don’t know that the legal-document meaning flows particularly naturally from the fencing sense or vice versa.
I am delighted to know about “allonge,” and I thank you!