Charters Earlier than 800 from French CollectionsChartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to the Ninth Century, 13: France I.Albert Bruckner , Robert Marichal , Hartmut Atsma , Jean VezinChartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to the Ninth Century, 14: France II.Hartmut Atsma , Jean VezinChartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to

Abstract

The volumes reviewed here Chartae Latinae antiquiores, volumes 13-19 contain the earliest surviving charters from French collections, in the provinces as well as Paris. The exacting method, sound scholarship, and full-scale facsimiles found on every page move the reader to awed admiration. In a few years the editors' technical introduction is due to appear; their commentary together with the splendid presentation of the documents should open a new era in Frankish diplomatics. The lion's share of the early royal charters Merovingian in volumes 1314, Carolingian in 15-16 comes from the Archives nationales, which obtained all of its early charters, private as well as royal, from the Monastery of St.-Denis. Volumes 17-19 contain exotic items from the Biblioth~que nationale and from several papyrus collections, including a Roman muster roll, a handwriting exercise, and many fragments of a scroll, originally approaching ten meters in length, from the municipal archives of sixth-century Ravenna. (For these special items, appropriate experts were called upon, such as Robert Marichal, a general editor of ChLA, for the Roman papyri and Jan-Olof Tjader for the papyri of Ravenna; and the format used by Hartmut Atsma and Jean Vezin sometimes yields to another.) Equally singular, in ChLA volumes 17-19, is a group of seventh-century payment lists from Tours, anticipating the estate documents of Carolingian times. The parchments had already been detected in an old Tours binding in the eighteenth century but had to endure many adventures before being first pub-