marta calleri & marta luigina mangini and all the material useful for the exercise of the ars. This can certainly be seen in the case of self-employed notaries, whose diverse clientèle represented diverse interests. Notaries also felt fully protected by the devolution of inheritance established in the wills of individual professionals and, if necessary, by the ability to find the personal details and places of business of legacies’ recipients through registers that were specifically drawn up by the competent authorities.44 But this fact can also be verified in the case of so-called specialised registers, i.e. those collecting all or part of the imbreviaturae pertaining to a single client, thus serving as a fundamental – yet at the same time ‘fragile’ – instrument for any attempt to regulate more or less structured lay and ecclesiastical entities.45 From the second half of the 13th century onwards, privileged clients, such as some of the major ecclesiastical institutions in the area under consideration, experimented with alternative solutions to ensure continuity in terms of the control and archival preservation of those documents which were necessary for the direct administration of their iura.46 In this period, we find numerous cases of wills in which notaries transferred their registers directly to the records offices where they had continuously worked throughout their careers. This solution, while not rendering the instrument of inheritance devolution meaningless, mitigated its more inconvenient consequences by ultimately allowing very particular clients to continue to draw autonomously and uninterruptedly on the documentation necessary to carry out their own administrative practices. This logic underlies, for example, the decision made by the famous notary and cleric Guglielmo Pagano, who in 1255 bequeathed to the cathedral chapter of Asti, in the person of one of its most influential canons, “cartularia sua … in quibus … multa instrumenta sunt abreviata pertinentia ad Astensem ecclesiam et canonicos”,47 so that “de ipsis <car213 44 Meyer 2009, pp. 227–229. For a specific example see the case of Milan; see Liva 1979, pp. 114–115. 45 Mangini 2011, pp. 59–78. 46 Mangini 2019, pp. 197–200. 47 “his records, in which there are many imbreviaturae pertaining to the church and canons ofAsti”.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=