The Problem of Primary Sources

Case Study: Donation Charter of Cluny

Sometime around 910/911 CE, William, Duke of Aquitaine, decided to give some land and villa to a monk he knew in order to start a monastery (Cluny). How does this get recorded and come down to us in the present?

Duke William tells the monk Berno he want to donate land.
Berno accepts and decides to get it in writing. He gets his monk Odo to write up the donation using flowery Latin in a really fancy script. Duke William probably doesn't read Latin, but Berno is one of his trusted Churchmen.
Berno stores this record (which we will call a "charter") away.
We jump forward a century, and Berno's monastery (or really one of his monasteries) has become pretty successful so they have a lot of charters thrown in a chest somewhere. They're hard to consult so they take the charters and write them up (organized mostly chronologically) in a book, called a cartulary (i.e. a bunch of charters).
In time, the abbot (the head of the monastery of Cluny) needs a copy of the charters to keep track of his legal rights, but so does the librarian or the person in charge of feeding the monks (because the charters might describe how many gallons of wine will be sent to the monastery each year). So copies are made by hand.... which often leads to mistakes entering the copies becuase by the twelfth-century they've forgotten the abbreviations used by tenth-century monks. Copies of the cartulary are sent to other monasteries, where they get copied again.
Time passes and printing arrives at Cluny. They print some stuff, usually hymnals and prayer books.
The monks of Cluny discover that they tend to be an target, when French Catholics and Protestants start to fight during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion. Cluny's (and its archives) get sacked a few times (often by people owing stuff to Cluny who want to destroy the records).
In the seventeeth century, the monks decide it would be really useful to have a printed edition of the cartularies so they can defend themselves against bishops and kings who are always trying to take their stuff and to guard against people destroying their archives. They're really interested in figuring out the earliest records so they print stuff, including letters and miracle stories from the time of the earliest and most famous abbots in a work called the Bibliotheca Cluniacensis (aka The Library of Cluny). This is the first example of an edition (i.e. a printed version) of the charter, which attempted to find the earliest versions of the charter to be printed.
In order to keep a proper record of everything, the monastery of Cluny decides that all its monks should send their records and cartularies to one of their outposts in Paris (the monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs) to be copied. A lot of stuff gets lost and disappears forever.
Then, the French people get angry at the king and revolt. A lot of the revolutionaries are really upset at the French Church for propping up the kind, and the monastery of Cluny is suppressed (i.e. shut down) in retaliation. The monks leave, but understandably pissed off ignore that they're told to leave everything. They take lots of books with them to a lot of different places.
The remaining books in the library/ archives are transferred to the city. Some townspeople are really interested in these documents and start making copies.
Some of these documents enter the collections of these "savants", others are lost to pilfering, but the bulk of the texts transferred ot the city of Cluny end up being sold to the newly created national library of France in the 19th century, where they remain today for the most part. Alexandre Bruel works on proper edition of the charters as part of a nineteenth-century predeliction for working on legal sources.
During the nineteenth-century Catholic revival in France, a printer and cleric named Jacques-Paul Migne reprinted centuries worth of printed editions in a huge series called the Patrologia Latina (ie. The Writings of the Latin Church Fathers). It was very popular and reprinted often, so most historians refer to his edition of Cluny's charters, even though he introduced many typographical errors and simplified the version from the Bibliotheca Cluniacensis.
The late 1990s saw the publication of print facsimiles of the earliest charters of Cluny, in Hermut Atsma and Jean Vezin's, Les plus anciens documents originaux de l'abbaye de Cluny (3 vols. 1997-2003), which definitatively established dating and provenience of the charter.
By the early 2000s, Barbara Rosenwein had been working on the early history of Cluny for decades and so decides to include a nineteenth-century t ranslation of the founding charter when she writes a (our!) textbook and primary source reader.
In the 2010s, the charters from the Bibliotheca Cluniacenesis, the Receuil des Chartes and the volumes of the Patrologia Latina are digitized and entered into a database of Burgundian charters, which makes the printed editions of the charters easy to access and search.
In the past few years, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France has embarked on an ambitious digitization program, which has allowed many of the manuscript versions of the foundation charter to made accessible online (see next page)

So ... there are many stages of transmission between the original donation and what we are reading...