Ancillary Documentation and the Beginnings of Dossierization

Abstract

This chapter examines the creation and collection of further documentation in and by the councils, such as letters, reports, memoranda, and petitions, directed to the imperial authorities, to bishops absent or to monastic leaders and often especially to the pope. They in turn elicited further texts, for instance of government responses. The assemblage of such texts into dossiers, in which the session-records are only one, albeit decisive, component, can be shown to begin occasionally with the council secretariats and during the conciliar period already, but regularly continues after the formal termination of the councils and in different locations. The sending, in particular, of select conciliar documentation together with pertaining cover letters results in collections of materials differently shaped in the archives of different senders and recipients.