The study of Peuilly's charters and documents

When you think of reconstructing the history of a place, the first source that comes to mind is the archives.

700 years of civil and religious archives in the case of Preuilly Abbey, plus 200 years of family archives.

Research into the history of the former Cistercian abbey of Preuilly was launched in 2015 by a group of volunteer enthusiasts and quickly focused on the collection of Preuilly charters held at the Seine et Marne Departmental Archives and listed as H328.

As they embarked on the mad adventure of transcribing this collection (one thousand handwritten pages!), the team quickly realised that they needed the help of a paleographic archivist, Valentine Weiss, who is in charge of the Parisian topography centre at the Archives nationales in Paris and an associate researcher at the Centre Roland Mousnier (CNRS).

Valentine Weiss has taken over, with the aim of working with her team to inventory and transcribe all the charters and records of the former abbey of Preuilly. After six years' work, this gigantic project is now in its final phase. By the end of 2025, digitised documents and transcriptions will be freely available to historians and researchers, in collaboration with the CNRS.

Which word did we bother to cut out? The word ‘Royale'