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One may hypothesize that the scribe who wrote a new list in fact recopied the names
in the previous one and added to the names of past members the ones who had joined
since the last completed list. The statutes required such a systematic reproduction of all
Table 1
Notre Dame: Legibility
ND1 ND2
Legible Illegible Total Legible Illegible Total
A 138 38 176 111 9 120
B 115 48 163 113 0 113
C 2113 34 300 30
D 2615 41 280 28
E0 0 0 1 0 1
F7414 88 781 79
G 234 255 489 253 56 309
I/J 31 30 61 36 11 47
L 7 56 63 35 24 59
M20 55 75 4132 73
N34 37 71 3818 56
O3 8 11 45 9
P 101 100 201 130 36 116
R 4113 54 413 44
S2437 61 273 30
T2620 46 361 37
U/V 1711 28 300 30
Z1 0 1 3 3 6
913 750 1663 1035 202 1237
Total: ND1 5 1663; ND2 5 1237.
Total legible: ND1 5 55%; ND2 5 84%.
Total illegible: ND1 5 45%; ND2 5 16%.
67
See Table 1, where the legibility of the document is rendered alphabetically, letter by letter. Each entry
occupies a line; therefore, the total given for each letter of the alphabet represents the total membership for
that letter, that is the total number of members whose first name starts with that letter.
68
See Rollo-Koster,  The People of Curial Avignon , 135 147, where I discuss in detail the meaning of these
Roman numerals (the year up to which a member had paid).
Forever after: the dead in the Avignonese confraternity of Notre Dame la Majour (1329 1381) 129
the names (liber sit de pergameno in quo scripta omnia nomina confratrum vivorum et
mortuorum). A survey of both lists indicates, however, that the repetition was not
unconditional. While the names found at the beginning of ND1 (the 1374 1381 list) are
indeed a repetition of names found in ND2 (the 1364 list), that repetition is only
partially systematic: of some 1237 members found in ND2 only 424 are repeated in ND1
(only 34%). In summary, ND1 starts with a partial series of names repeated from ND2,
followed by a series of names unrelated to that previous list.69 The conclusion is
inescapable. When ND1 was compiled, the association utilized some criteria to decide
who would be kept from the previous list and who would be eliminated.
The statutes themselves offer some explanations for the removal of certain names
from the registers. The causes could be moral or simply financial. Homicide committed
against brothers and repeated blasphemy resulted in expulsion from the association.70
Financial irresponsibility regarding the payment of dues was also penalized with
expulsion from the association and the exclusion of one s name from the list.71
How did the administration recognize which names to keep and which to eliminate?
The various crosses and addenda found in the margins of the document provide partial
answers to this question. I discuss them in details in Appendix A.
Following the statutal evidence, one might imagine the following scenario. After
August 15 of each year (members paid their yearly dues on that date), the administration
gathered a list of members, old and new, who had just paid their dues. Such lists exist in
the ledgers that follow both matriculations, but they are unfortunately hardly legible for
the period being investigated, from the 1360s to the 1390s. Once the list of recently paid
dues was established in the ledger, a scribe compared the names of those who had just
paid with the names present in the most recent matriculation list. As long as a member
paid his dues regularly, his name was left untouched in the matriculation list.
Alternately, an addenda such as  he is believed dead or  he did not come and did not
pay , or a cross, was added in front of a matriculant s name to indicate his lack of
payment. Palaeographic evidence shows that they were, in fact, added after the
matriculations were completed. The hands, a minuscule cursive, are different from those
that compiled the matriculation lists.
It could be suggested that these crosses added to the matriculation lists were intended
strictly to mark the dead in  good standing . Nicolas Terpstra noticed this practice in his
study of early modern Bolognese confraternities (see p. 125). However, the use of this
cross was not as clearly defined by Notre Dame la Majour as it was in the Bolognese
confraternities. The crosses did imply the  corporative death of a member, but they did
not entail, in many cases, the physical death of an associate nor his good standing within
the association.
All crosses designated individuals who were in violation of the statutes, that is, those
69
This fact alone establishes a direct connection between both lists (the existence of an eventual intermediate
list would still not explain the disappearance of names from one list to another). Since the first list starts with
a repetition of the second one, it seems plausible to assume that the first list was compiled when the second
one had already been completed. This in turn implies that the second list chronologically precedes the first
one, Rollo-Koster,  The People of Curial Avignon , 153.
70
Pansier,  Les confréries d Avignon , 37, 41.
71
Pansier,  Les confréries d Avignon , 39, 43.
130 Joëlle Rollo-Koster
who had lost their benefits because they had not been paying their dues for the three to
five years since the date of compilation of ND2 (there is no reason to assume that a large
percentage of the membership in ND2 was dropped from ND1 because they had
commited blasphemy and homicide).72 If members had not been paying their dues, on
the other hand, the association wanted to find out why. The different crosses, and the
addenda, indicate the various justifications for nonpayment.
According to this recording procedure, a reader perusing the list was able to ascertain,
with the help of the various symbols used, if a member still belonged to the association
or not. Surprisingly, the association did not differentiate in its recording procedure [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]