Collecting Papal Letters in Late Carolingian Times. The Salzburg Rotulus (Vienna, ÖStA, HHStA UR AUR 15)

The Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna preserves a unique document: a parchment roll of a total length of around 2 metres and a width of 22 centimetres. This so-called Salzburg Rotulus contains a collection of eight letters and privileges, each item being headed by a distinct lemma. Though the particular interest of this collection in the pallium and the status of the church of Salzburg as a metropolitan see has been noted more than once, these documents have never been studied as a cohesive collection of letters and privileges. Recent scholarship on collection processes, and particularly letter collections, invites us to consider the latter not only as the mere sum of its parts. Extracted from their original context, the selected documents are given a new purpose within the collection that becomes a work in its own right. In my paper, I stress how the documents assembled in the collection of the Salzburg Rotulus form a cohesive historical and legal narrative. In this case study, I will focus more broadly on the methodological opportunities this collection provides in order to comprehend letter collections as a distinct, but still quite diverse, genre. I focus on three aspects of this collection: the lemmata, the ordering, and the typology of the assembled items.