{"id":681,"date":"2016-08-06T09:29:01","date_gmt":"2016-08-06T08:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/?p=681"},"modified":"2016-08-06T19:09:40","modified_gmt":"2016-08-06T18:09:40","slug":"mapping-hugos-annales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/06\/mapping-hugos-annales\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Hugo’s “Annales”"},"content":{"rendered":"

For historians, one of the most useful things about new digital mapping technologies are the new ways in which they let us approach our body of sources. As someone who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Premonstratensian Order in medieval France, I’ve spent much of the last few years immersed in the works of one man: Charles-Louis Hugo. His books\u2014particularly the magisterial but uncompleted Sacri et Canonici Ordinis Praemonstratensis annales<\/em>\u2014preserved the text of many medieval documents which are otherwise lost to us. Without the Annales<\/em>, my doctoral work\u2014and the work of other people interested in the Premonstratensian Order over the years\u2014would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.<\/p>\n

However, when I mapped out the Annales<\/em>\u2014visualising the places from where Hugo got his information\u2014it was very clear to me that it’s a work shaped by the particular moment in history when it was produced. The Annales<\/em> has been shaped by the fact that it was produced in post-Reformation Europe, and we need to keep that in mind when using it as a source for the history of the order in the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n

Who was Hugo?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The abbey church of Pont \u00e0 Mousson. [Source<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Born in 1667 into a middle-class family into a small town in eastern France that had been profoundly affected by conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, Hugo took his religious vows while still a teenager. He did so in the Premonstratensian abbey of Pont \u00e0 Mousson, the mother house of the reform branch of the order. Hugo spent time at the abbeys of Jovilliers, Jandeures, and \u00c9tival, before becoming prior of Saint-Joseph de Nancy in 1700. There he helped to reconstruct the priory and establish its library.<\/p>\n

In 1713, Hugo moved to the abbey of \u00c9tival, one of the largest religious institutions in Lorraine. There he undertook his greatest works, the two-volume Sacr\u00e6 Antiquitatis<\/em> (1725) and the Annales<\/em> (1734). His involvement in ecclesiastical in-fighting saw him sent away from \u00c9tival for a while, but papal and ducal favour allowed him to eventually return to the abbey. He died there in 1739 at the age of 71, having been a Premonstratensian for 54 years.<\/p>\n

The Annales<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hugo acquired the material for the Annales<\/em> by corresponding with people across Europe\u2014much more material than was ever published, in fact, owing to Hugo’s death. (His notebooks containing a wealth of still-to-be-mined transcriptions and observations are now held at the municipal library in the French town of Nancy.)<\/p>\n

\"Title<\/a>
Title page of the first volume of Charles-Louis Hugo’s Annales<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first two volumes of the Annales<\/em> are a kind of gazetteer of the order’s houses, with each entry consisting of a historical notice, together with a list of abbots or abbesses where known. Entries vary in length from a paragraph or two to several pages. The second two volumes are the probationes<\/em>, the evidence\u2014in other words, they contain the text of the charters, papal bulls, privileges, letters, and other documents on which Hugo drew. Publishing transcriptions of these documents was a substantial undertaking. As you can see from the index which I compiled of the two probationes<\/em> volumes<\/a>, there are 767 documents transcribed in the first volume, and 792 in the second. Some of these sources survive in the original, or in other medieval or early modern copies. Others are known to us only from Hugo’s transcriptions.<\/p>\n

Mapping the Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n

Each circle on the map below represents a Premonstratensian community which was the subject of a document contained in the probationes<\/em> volumes. The circles are sized proportionately: the larger they are, the more documents about that house. (In instances where a document is an agreement between, say, Abbey A and B, I counted that towards the total of both abbeys since Hugo could have potentially obtained a copy from either institution and he rarely states how he specifically came across a document. In instances where the document concerns the order as a whole, as with some papal bulls, I omitted it from the count.)<\/p>\n