The individual’s desire to ensure the future of their soul led to the written record being favoured over the oral contract, because of its enduring nature. It constitutes a guarantee of lasting preservation of the forms of religious intercession found in the testaments that have survived to the present day.1 This aspect marks the entrance of the public notary as the author of a document of proof: the ability to endow an act with probative value means that its testimony confers an extraordinary amount of reliability to the act. In this paper we shall discuss some of the results of research that dealt with the public notaries of the city of Porto, Portugal, between the 13th and15th centuries.2 This time span was selected because the research focused on the period between 1242 – the first reference to a public notary in Porto – and 1495 – the date of the death of King João II. The material for this research consists mainly of primary sources deposited in the District and the Santa Casa da Misericórdia archives of Porto. In a diplomatics analysis, we shall assess the documentation produced by the public notaries, and in this specific case we shall accord greater importance to last wills and testaments.3 The reason for this is that they are important as significant historical sources for those who study economic and social history, and particularly for those who specialise in the history of mentalities with a strong focus on the devotional sphere and humanity’s situation when facing the problems of the afterlife.4 For the Middle Ages, the importance of the documents we treat is double, since it is difficult to find other testimonies that bring us so close to the individual, their relationships of kinship or service, and the material and spiritual framework of their daily lives – in other words, their most 1 Vilar and Silva 1992, p. 40. 2 Some of these results have been published by Seabra 2020. 3 A first approach on these types of notarial documents was undertaken by Seabra 2016, although also considering donations mortis causa which will not be the subject of this study. 4 Marques 1993, p. 185. Introduction notarial last wills and testaments from medieval porto 518
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=