Prying into a notary’s finances. A study on the Ligurian notariate: Genoa and Savona (1154-1225)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/1593-2214/6131Keywords:
Middle Ages, 12th-13th Centuries, Genoa, Savona, Notariate, Economic status, WealthAbstract
Thanks to a particularly fortunate situation in terms of documentary preservation (as concerns both the antiquity and the amount of available material), Liguria’s two chief cities, Genoa and Savona, are an exceptional starting point for an attempt at establishing the actual income of a medieval notary. The research has been conducted on the fragments, both edited and unpub- lished, of registers belonging to 24 notaries, beginning from the oldest surviving cartulary (of Giovanni scriba, 1154) up to those dating from the first quarter of the thirteenth century. By collecting references to fees paid for different types of contracts it has been possible to recon- struct a draft of a “price list”. This draft has been used as a basis to calculate an approximate income. A comparison of this data with the “cost of living” during this period allows to evaluate the economic status of this professional category, the way notaries invested their incomes, and their social status.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
RM Journal is an open access, online publication, with licence:
| CCPL Creative Commons Attribution |
The author retains the copyright of his work whilst granting anyone the possibility “to reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate, publicly exhibit, display, perform and recite the work”, provided that the author and the title of the journal are cited correctly. When submitting the text for publication the author is furthermore required to declare that the contents and the structure of the work are original and that it does not by any means compromise the rights of third parties nor the obligations connected to the safeguard of the moral and economic rights of other authors or other right holders, both for texts, images, photographs, tables, as well as for other parts which compose the contribution. The author furthermore declares that he/she is conscious of the sanctions prescribed by the penal code and by the Italian Criminal and Special Laws for false documents and the use false documents, and that therefore Reti Medievali is not liable to responsibilities of any nature, civil, administrative or penal, and that the author agrees to indemnify and hold Reti Medievali harmless from all requests and claims by third parties.
