the forms and functions of notaries’ wills in central and northern italy 204 Among the various perspectives adopted in recent decades for the study of wills, there is no doubt that one particular category of testators has been completely overlooked: notaries, who must be studied in their double capacity as authors of legal transactions and, in the case of holographicwills,1 as authors of documentation.2 Through a survey, which by no means claims to be exhaustive, we have identified more than 60 documents that allow us to study lesser-known aspects of the notarial profession. The terminus post quemis necessarily the middle of the 12th century, when the legal renaissance in Italy3 led to the rediscovery of the Roman testamentumand the many norms governing it, as attested to in theCodex Justinianus.As for theterminus ad quem, we have left it rather vague, since testaments are by their very nature retrospective documents. Geographically, the corpus is limited, yet significant: the regions of central-northern Italy for which records have been found are, in descending order by number of attestations, Tuscany, Lombardy, Liguria, Piedmont, and Emilia Romagna. As far as the transmission of the documents is concerned, it should be noted that all but one of the documents found have been written using imbreviaturae and are structured, albeit with some slight discrepancies due to the stage of their second drafting, according to Rolandinus’ guidelines in the Flos testamentorum, in which he establishes a sequence of six divisions – three main and necessary divisions and three causal and voluntary ones – that constitute this particular type of document. We have found only four holographic wills:4 the earliest is that of Rolandinus, written in 1270 in the meadow behind the chapterhouse of San Domenico, in the presence of five friars, most notably Martinus de Fano. 1 On this kind of will, see Calleri 2019, with further bibliography. 2 The bibliography is extensive, so we will only refer to Bartoli Langeli 1985; Bougard et al. 2005; and Rossi 2010, with the further bibliography they provide. 3 Rossi 2010. 4 Rolandinus Rodulphinus Bononiensis (1546), p. II, cap. VIII, rubr. Quot et quae sint et quae et quot causales et voluntariae, fol. 246r–v. See Chiodi 2002; Sinisi 2019. Introduction
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