marta calleri & marta luigina mangini the sepulchres that from the 13thcentury onwards were gradually reserved for deceased notaries – for example, in the cloister of the Church of St. Dominic in Genoa,21 in the chapel of St Luke the Evangelist in Parma,22 or at the altar dedicated to St Luke the Evangelist in the cathedral of Milan23 – was a way of signalling one’s social positionad perpetuam memoriamand of being able to continue to participate, if only passively, in the city’s most significant liturgical practices even after one’s death. Similarly, the decision to donate part of one’s estate towards helping the needy should not be taken to reflect purely personal motives, but should also be interpreted in the light of the numerous prescriptions and notarial statutes that obliged members of the guild of notaries, when drawing up a will, to recall specific obligations of solidarity and care, both towards any other members in difficulty as well as towards one’s relatives. The solidarity of the guild became tangible at particular moments in the lives of its members, and the burial rite certainly represented their culmination: in Como, for example, it was the duty of all the city’s notaries to accompany a colleague “qui decedere contingerit in civitate et burgis Cumarum”.24 The gesture of gathering around the deceased to bid him a fitting farewell to earthly life signalled to his relatives the institution’s intention of extending the same support to them that was previously provided to the deceased. At the same time, it acquired a public dimension, highlighting the strength and compactness of the guild, as well as its prestige and power in the urban space. These choices carried a strong political and self-representative significance that transcended the earthly boundaries of human life: the surviving members of the guild would pledge that their obligation to express solidarity would not end with the burial of their deceased colleague, but 209 21 Genoa, State Archive, Notai antichi, 434, fol.1r; see Costamagna 1970, pp. 222–223, note 17. 22 Aliani 1995, pp. 145–146. 23 Liva 1979, p. 243. 24 “who happened to die in the town of Como or one of the nearby villages”; see Mangini 2007, p. 41.
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