maría josefa sanz fuentes & guillermo fernández ortiz 557 his article presents a study of wills drawn up in Asturias during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The corpus under consideration consists of thirty-three wills and two codicils, which in the main have already been published. All the wills have been preserved in church archives; in almost all cases, they are notarial instruments, although there are some examples which also have been authenticated by seal. Only one of the documents has been identified as being included within a notarial register. The collection consists of open, closed, and orally-declared testaments. The overwhelming majority have been drawn up in the vernacular, although some of the earliest items were composed in Latin. As regards their structure, we take note of some variations in specific formulae, a number of which were retained in a residual fashion (as with the verbal invocation), while others were increasingly expanded with new information, as can be seen in the intitulation. We analyse all parts of the documents, from invocation to validation, drawing attention to the varied possibilities offered by the disposition, which – by a considerable amount – is the section which is most developed and susceptible to variation, depending upon the period and the testator’s socio-economic position. A constant in all wills is the designation of executors, therogatio directing the notary to compile the document, the naming of witnesses, and the notarial clausula(except for those few cases where the testament has been authenticated only by seal). We may thus say that, by the end of the fourteenth century in the Crown of Castile, the structure of wills had become fixed, as had the (uniformly notarial) means of their authentification. T Abstract * Proyecto pid2023–146105nb–i00 Financiado por miciu/aei/10.13039/501100011033 ypor feder,ue.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=