One does not find many charters for the constitution of dowers in the archives of the tenth through twelfth centuries. The impressive series of sponsalicia from Cluny is unique in this respect, a precious exception confirming the rule of rarity that seems to prevail with acts of this sort, even when they pertain to persons of princely rank. Yet in the course of an entirely different investigation, I had the good fortune to encounter a small group of five dower charters, most of which were unpublished. It is a homogeneous corpus from two points of view: as regards the date of their composition, because these acts emerge during a short period of less than twenty years (1163–81); and as regards their district of origin, because they all derive from the ecclesiastical province of Reims. Four of them are from the diocese of Laon (Charters 1, 3, 4, and 5), and the other (2) is from the neighboring diocese of Soissons.

The rarity of this diplomatic genre, the uniformity of the body of material, and the hitherto lukewarm interest in matrimonial questions among historians were all reasons inviting the preparation of a rather extensive commentary. It was desirable first to examine, as well as their internal characteristics, problems regarding the production of these documents. Two lines of approach then suggested themselves, which I have followed in turn: first, I have examined the manner in which most of the charters spoke of marriage; then, passing from the preamble to the disposition, I have focused on the description of the dower itself, attempting, insofar as the biographical data concerning the spouses permitted it, to determine the characteristics of the matrimonial unions documented therein.