Title: Archival Tales of Loss and Recovery

Scott Smith, English and Comparative Literature

Abstract: This work in progress comes from a book project that examines the uses of writing in early medieval England as a means to establish and maintain the possession of land as property over time. The book argues that this mode of writing can be read as a legal fiction, defined as an assumption accepted into legal practice as an operative fact that enables certain legal procedures and outcomes. Writing about land came to function as such a fiction, becoming a form of belief in which the written instrument provided the best (if not the only) means of establishing possession and protecting it from dispute and counterclaim in the long term. At the same time, land texts frequently developed defensive measures against outcomes that contradicted the fiction of instrumental writing, which were many. Consequently, writing about land was driven to increased invention and elaboration, in content, style, and form. This process did work to reify and reinvest the power of writing, but it also reinscribed its repeated failures.

"Archival Tales of Loss and Recovery" follows a chapter that reads dispute narratives as individual, situational texts that were produced to clarify past controversy and provide conclusive claims about right ownership. This work in progress examines a cluster of related documents from the archive of St. Andrews Cathedral, Rochester, all of which concern the same three estates and their contentious history. I read these documents, which include both individual items and texts copied within a house cartulary, as an aggregate text whose collective contents overwhelm their practical purpose. The documents do establish, in the end, Rochester’s claims, but their narrative content also exposes the vulnerability of proprietary writing to shifts in politics and patronage. In such situations, writing is not enough.

A PDF of the draft will be circulated to the listserv a week before the workshop.