Chartularium Monasterii Casauriensis Facsimile Edition

The Chartularium Monasterii Casauriensis, also known as the Chronicon Casauriense, is an exceptional cartulary-chronicle created at the Benedictine Abbey of San Clemente a Casauria in the Abruzzo region of Italy. Compiled between around 1170 and 1182, it records the monastery’s history from its ninth-century foundation to the death of Abbot Leonas, whose patronage shaped the project. More than an administrative register, the manuscript transforms the abbey’s documentary archive into a carefully constructed narrative of institutional memory.

An Archive Made into History

The monk Johannes Berardi assembled copies of privileges, donations, property transactions, and papal and imperial documents concerning the abbey. These records are accompanied by a continuous historical account, creating a visual and textual dialogue between legal evidence and monastic interpretation. The arrangement affirms the antiquity of Casauria’s rights while recounting periods of patronage, conflict, destruction, and renewal.

Authority in Word and Image

The manuscript was written by Master Rusticus, who was also responsible for its distinctive cycle of approximately forty illustrations. Executed primarily as pen drawings in brown and red ink, they portray abbots, monks, popes, emperors, and kings. Repeated scenes of rulers presenting charters to the monastic community give visible form to the transfer of privilege and protection. Even the abbey itself appears as an architectural emblem of collective identity.

The Memory of a Community

Text, document, and image work together to defend the monastery’s possessions and preserve its place within the political landscape of medieval southern Italy. The manuscript therefore embodies both historical testimony and institutional self-fashioning. Its pages reveal how a religious community understood its past—not as a distant sequence of events, but as a living inheritance secured through writing.