the forms and functions of notaries’ wills in central and northern italy From what has been said so far, it is clear that a notary enjoyed considerable leeway in drawing up his own will. The competent authorities (e.g. municipality, notarial college, etc.) would intervene only under certain conditions: first of all, in the event of disputes occurring for whatever reason pertaining to the management of the registers and their proceeds, or in the absence of a will, or if there was a will but it did not assign the registers to anyone.40 Crucially, the competent body would also authorise a notary to draw up documents from his deceased colleague’s register of imbreviaturae. Once again, this person would be appointed, firstly, by taking into account any last wishes expressed by the deceased, and secondly by selecting him from among those who were familiar with the methods of drawing up and managing the documentation used by the deceased notary during his career.41 One last noteworthy aspect about which notarial wills help to shed light concerns the places where the assets earned by the deceased notaries and/or the instruments they used in the profession were stored after their death, and the people responsible for storing them. As has recently been pointed out, the “geography of preservation” of notarial documents in Italy includes cases in which, more or less early on, it was made obligatory to deposit the writings in public archives,42 alongside other cases well into the modern age in which notaries continued to exercise a personal monopoly over their records.43 In other areas, largely corresponding to the Po Valley and vast swathes of Tuscany, notarial wills represent an extremely effective instrument throughout the period covered by this article, since they could be adapted to the most varied requirements for the transmission of imbreviaturae 212 40 “ut aliquis idoneus notarius … ad ea confitienda et scribenda constituatur”, i.e. “that a suitable notary be appointed to draw up and write theimbreviaturae”; see Scarazzini 1977, p. 117, cap. CXXXIV. 41 Beginning in the 13th century, legal doctrine and the prescriptions of statutory regulations increasingly came to focus precisely on these delicate steps, which could have important implications for the validity of documents. See Sarti 2002. 42 This was the case in Genoa, for example, where “already in the 12th century there must have been a place where documents drawn up by the notaries were collected and stored”, Costamagna 1990, p. 7; our translation from the Italian. 43 Giorgi, Moscadelli 2014.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=