marta calleri & marta luigina mangini We believe that the application to a geographically- and chronologicallydefined documentary corpus of an analysis such as the one proposed here, based on the study of the modes of transmission, contents, and forms of notaries’ wills, has allowed us to explore testamentary documents from a novel perspective. In doing so, we have highlighted the wide range of intentions with which these documents were dictated – and, much more rarely, written in holographic form – by professionals, and at the same time the multiple levels of interpretation to which we can subject them. These sources can be studied not only within the widely-explored field of religious and socio-economic history, but also on levels that are closely related to the kind of questions addressed by diplomatics. The analysis of notarial wills therefore seems more essential than ever if we wish not only to freshly consider certain topics that are dear to the history of the notarial profession – such as the practices that were typical of guild solidarity, and which have so far been studied mainly in legislation – but also to understand some issues more specifically related to the dynamics of documentary transmission. These include the mechanisms of devolution andpost-mortempreservation of documents produced and/or held in the course of a notary’s professional activity – primarily registers of imbreviaturae, but also formularies and law codes. 215 Conclusions
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