Cartularization and Genre Boundaries: Reflection on the Nondiplomatic Material of the Toledan Cartularies (End of the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century)

Medievalists have long treated the nondiplomatic materials often included in cartularies as marginal. Owing to the New Diplomatics trend, however, scholars have begun engaging with such materials, attentive to the discursive strategies that exceed a cartulary’s legal contents and examining the process of “cartularization” as a whole. This paper contributes to the discussion, taking as a case study the eight cartularies produced for the Primatial Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo from the end of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, all of them incorporating pieces of a nondiplomatic nature in addition to charters, diplomas, and other bulls. Comparing their distinct rationales and modalities for incorporating nondiplomatic materials, and examining resonances between codices, the analysis shows that cartularists did not always give the same status to the nondiplomatic documents they “cartularized,” even when they incorporated the same material into successive cartularies. The study therefore highlights the various ways in which producers of cartularies engaged with genre boundaries, and how they made use of genre diversity to increase the discursive potential of diplomatic codices.