miguel calleja-puerta 407 hestudyof testaments as a genre of document may be justified through the centrality of hereditary bequests in Ancien Régime societies, which placed the writing of wills at the centre of their privatelaw institutions. The purpose of this article is to identify in the period 1150–1250 the process by which a model of will was shaped to accommodate the reception of Roman law, and to identify some ways in which it was received.The detailed contents of the aforementioned documents have not been examined, but rather this study is limited to their creation and form. Documents preserved in cathedral archives have been chosen as the basis for analysis for the following reasons: first, following the hypothesis that as Spanish dioceses increased their contacts with the Roman Church, their clerics were exposed to the influence of new juridical practices and ways of composing documents; second, thanks to the dioceses’ covering the entirety of the kingdom, amore granular image might be gained through their study, rather than through a monographic focus on a particular locality, thus mitigating to some degree the problems associated with intermittent preservation of documents from that period. In this work, it has been possible to assemble a corpus of testaments approaching one hundred items, two-thirds of which have been transmitted in their original form. The ratio between lay and clerical testators follows a similar proportion, in favour of the latter. As regards geographic distribution, the majority of the materials surveyed have come from the cathedral archives of León, Orense, and Toledo, while examples from other sees are less frequent or even wholly absent. As for the chronological range of the documents, there is no noticeable evolution: the greatest number are concentrated in the 1240s, with a second highpoint in the 1190s; but, in contrast, the lowest number of documents is registered in the 1210s. T Abstract * Proyecto pid2023–146105nb–i00 Financiado por miciu/aei/10.13039/501100011033 ypor feder,ue.
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