Caroline Brett visited conferences at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and at Landévennec Abbey to speak on the Cartulary of Landévennec and the evidence it provides for western Brittany’s external contacts in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Her report:
Landévennec was the leading monastery of western Brittany from at least the early ninth century, and a centre of literary and manuscript production. The so-called Cartulary of Landévennec is a small collection of property-records appended to a collection of Lives of Landévennec’s local saints in a manuscript dated 1047 × 1055. Most of the records lack any authenticating charter-protocol; about half of them claim to record gifts from the legendary King Gradlon of Brittany to St Winwaloe, the monastery’s founder, and a further substantial subset consist of narratives in which local saints offered their church-foundations and property to St Winwaloe. The cartulary has often been dismissed as a feeble forgery, in spite of Wendy Davies’s partial rehabilitation of it thirty years ago. I argued that in view of its early date, it should not be judged against the classic cartularies of the twelfth century but rather as a commemorative work closer to hagiography or abbatial and episcopal Gesta, a genre which antedated the cartulary in western Francia. It may also have been directly inspired by Tirechán’s Collectanea in the Book of Armagh (807): a sort of ‘hagiographized cartulary’ in which narratives of St Patrick’s missionary travels as Ireland functioned as validations of Armagh’s seventh-century control of ‘his’ churches. Out of the many possible combinations of charter and hagiography, I suggested that the reproduction of hagiographical narratives as ‘charter’-texts is particularly characteristic of Brittonic and Gaelic sources. A similar overall construction and relationship between hagiography and charters can be seen in three somewhat later Breton and Welsh charter-collections, which may, in their turn, have been inspired by the Landévennec cartulary: the Cartulary of Quimperlé (1118 × 1127), Lifris’s Life of St Cadog with its appended charters (late eleventh/early twelfth century), and the Book of Llandaff (1130s). An example of a ‘hagiographical charter’ is also found in the twelfth-century notes in the gospel-book of Deer from north-eastern Scotland. Landévennec’s place in the evolution of this form of document indicates that it was well connected within the Atlantic Celtic-speaking world.
https://www.dias.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Celtic_Hagiography_Programme.pdf
https://www.univ-brest.fr/digitalAssets/68/68694_Programme-colloque-Landevennec.pdf