Last wills between autography and mediation: testaments of notaries and jurists in fourteenth-century Bergamo
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-2214/12329Keywords:
Middle Ages, 14th century, Bergamo, Alberico da Rosciate, wills, notariesAbstract
The article delves into the drafting of wills, as a distinctive domain of notarial mediation between clients’ needs and legal frameworks, focusing on the experiences of certain notaries and judges from 14th-century Bergamo, who actively collaborated with third-party notaries in the composition of their own last wills. This collaboration was expressed both through the direct drafting of wills or will drafts, followed by their formalization and validation via an instrumentum, and through the preparation of instructions and memoranda that clarified the content of the wills and specified the methods of their execution. The described cases illustrate the ability to establish intertextual networks between wills and the increasingly extensive and structured group of account books and memorialia, whose production was becoming widespread among prominent Bergamasque families, precisely due to the original practices introduced by notaries.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Paolo Buffo
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