The Use of Pragmatic Documents in Medieval Wallachia and Moldavia: Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries by Mariana Goina

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Use of Pragmatic Documents in Medieval Wallachia and Moldavia: Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries by Mariana Goina Mark Amsler Goina, Mariana, The Use of Pragmatic Documents in Medieval Wallachia and Moldavia: Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 47), Turnhout, Brepols, 2020; cloth; pp. xvii, 329; 26 b/w illustrations, 2 b/w tables; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503587974. Michael Clanchy, riffing on Claude Levi-Strauss, kickstarted a branch of social history seeking out ‘literate mentalities’. In particular, pragmatic literacy studies refer to the uses of documents for everyday or administrative communication or for record-keeping purposes. Mariana Goina’s new book, based on her Central European University dissertation, brings new and interesting light to a late development in European literacy in the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (present-day Romania). Oddly, after the Romans exited from Dacia around 271 ce, it was more than a thousand years before another literate culture emerged in the area. How did that happen? Goina takes on that question in her rich archival study. Her book is organized in three parts: historical background, survey of the sources, and use and dissemination of written texts. The sources range from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Goina’s multi-chapter survey of sources makes for dense reading, as she gives generous detailed attention to the types of documents, primarily land charters and letters. Her analysis of the uses and dissemination of writing in Moldavia and Wallachia shows how people continued to use oral modes of validation and communication alongside newer, sometimes foreign, written modes. From her sources, she also works out what people thought about the written texts they were using, their ‘literate mentalities’, whether a land charter needed to be authenticated by oral testimony or whether it could be evidence of ownership in itself, or whether the charter was an aide-memoire for what was considered the primary oral agreement. Goina’s study of Moldavian and Wallachian documents will make better known texts whose genres may be familiar but whose local details and what they reveal about social and political life of the time are less so. The history of literacy is social history, and Goina and her documents don’t disappoint. Land ownership was a constant and contentious experience across the social spectrum, from princes and high court officials to merchants and villagers. In late fifteenth-century Wallachia, for example, as higher-ups sought to acquire and consolidate land holdings, free villagers marshalled written authority to certify their ownership and prevent encroachment and their relegation to serfdom. It is sobering to see the extent to which the surviving documents are mostly to do with land inheritance, ownership, and conveyance. Writing goes hand in hand with control or disruption of power. Goina discusses many intriguing cases of literacy as social practice. She explains the legal fiction by which a family used a specific text to turn a daughter into a ‘son’ and therefore eligible to inherit land, or the practice of adopting another member of the community as a ‘brother’ for similar purposes. Textual acts [End Page 243] are constitutive within a social context. At the same time, Goina’s evidence points to women’s, especially widows’, active participation in literate culture, mostly on behalf of inheritance and land ownership. The surviving documents also reveal the costs of literacy. To make a land charter, an owner or claimant might pay the scribe a horse or forty złotis, but then pay out six times that amount for a feast to gather together ‘oath-helpers’ to vouch orally for the charter and the land rights. Goina pays good attention to the languages of charters and other documents in the archives. Charters and other texts survive in Latin, Slovanic, Polish, and German. German communities were especially prominent in the principalities. Wallachian and Moldavian literacy was thickened by the active presence of Hungarian, German, Polish, and other foreign scribes in the principalities. The princes’ international relations and the region’s geographic location as a major trade route suggest how local practices were partly shaped by other literate contacts, especially merchants. It is also clear from Goina’s research that literate practice...