The chanceries of rulers in the central Middle Ages, with their professional mixture of diplomacy and diplomatics, were in a very real sense laboratories for experimentation in the fermentation of scholarship and ideology. In such crucibles learning, administrative practices, and scholarly tools were expected to produce a particularly complex alloy, official documents endowed with authority, instrumentality, and warranty. In the spatio-temporal framework under consideration, northern France, England, Italy, and Germany between 1050 and 1300, this written output included diplomas, privileges, bulls, charters, and mandates, that is, objects emblazoned with words, graphic signs, and images for the purpose of effectively conveying orders, decisions, actions, grants, and laws (Fig. 6.1). An expanding stream of petitions, complaints, charges and counter-charges, and appeals also needed careful responses drafted by men with expertise in biblical and legal texts.
The task of devising, expressing, and communicating governmental decisions was entrusted to scribes, notaries, sealers, whose work was supervised by chancellors. Chancellors played a major role in the overall administrative structure of the court or household they served, including such responsibilities as the judicial system and the vicarious representation of a ruler in his absence. Most continental chancery staff was professionally, indeed often university, trained. Chancellors in particular, who were likely to have had extensive schooling, and frequently held academic titles as masters, retained contact with fellow graduates, and remained au courant with intellectual trends, to which they often contributed their own scholarship. Chancellors thus brought to their bureaucratic task an understanding of linguistics and dictaminal arts, of law, logic, natural sciences, and theology.1
In this paper,2 I will argue that challenges involved in designing effective documentary forms for bureaucratic processes were very much related to larger issues, scholarly and political, concerned with the agency of mediated and material communication. Documents tested the role of texts and artefacts in practice, and had to contend with the ways in which institutional documentary culture could produce crises of signification even as it undertook to affirm and circulate the truthfulness of official actions. The instrumentality of documents was predicated upon a proper integration of material format, rhetorical modes, and graphic design, a system within which seals anchored the equilibrium of the whole. In thus engaging the notion of causality in relation to truth, textual form, and material support, sealed documents became a rich site of speculation for medieval theologians, natural philosophers, lawyers, and rhetoricians. These interactions between scholarly discourse, governmental praxis, and material semiotics yielded a secondary language, one that came to extend beyond the norms enunciated to regulate the operation of seals in society, and thus challenged the very organising principles of governmental practice and ruling authority.