William Mendel Newman , ca. The first stage, in , was the collection and preliminary editing of the texts; the second stage, in , was the annotation of the charters and the preparation of the introduction and index; the third stage was the checking of the texts, done in the s by Jean-Baptiste Giard and perhaps by Newman himself, who may also have revised his introduction at that time; and the final stage, from to , was the revision of the entire work by Theodore Evergates, in collaboration with me.
I have always followed Prou and wish to continue to do so. Unless something is really wrong one should not change my ms. More serious is the question of the introductions. When in the 19th century the French scholars began to edit cartular[i]es, it was proper to have an introduction.
But so many monastic histories have been published that the situation has changed. Thinking now of small houses, why do we publish their charters? The history of the monastery is of only local interest in as much as we know few facts not contained in the charters. These charters should be used to help understand social, economic and institutional problems rather than for [the] local history of the house.
The present introduction, which is essentially the work of Professor Evergates, is based more on these principles than on what Newman wrote almost forty years ago. In , in a personal letter, he wrote:. I believe it a mistake for an indexer to be too learned and to group names in a linguistic fashion. And how about identifying people? I did so whenever it was possible in my unpublished cartularies and finally decided that few scholars would undertake editing if they were obliged to do genealogical research of any extent.
Is it not more realistic to get the documents published with an index, and hope that someday someone will publish an article on their genealogies? It is in this spirit, which we believe is also the spirit of Newman, that we offer the present collection to the public, with a consciousness of its unevenness but a confidence that it will advance both the knowledge of the region on which Newman worked and the understanding of the broader problems in which he was interested, though he rarely addressed himself to them in his published works.
