anja thaller The overall writing material is parchment, as paper was only used for one of the youngest wills of the corpus (no. 45). Among the testaments that have survived in their original form, there are no holographs, entirely handwritten by the testatrix herself. Unlike the authors of notarial instruments, most scribes of sealed charters remain unidentified. Only occasionally a kind of iussio allows identification (no. 29). The scribes of wills may have been the testatrix’s personal scribes or part of the chancery; sometimes the will was written by her confessor.28 Clues to further identification may be provided if a scribe is named amongst the executors, beneficiaries, witnesses, or sealers.29 The scripts used are Gothic cursives (changing from the older to younger Gothic cursive around 1380), Chancery Cursives, and Bastarda/Hybrida scripts. The German Current script is shown in 16th century wills. The 1283 and 1284 wills of Countess Matilda of Sayn, remarkable for several reasons, stand out because they were written in a book script, a Textualis, by an identified cleric.30 The length of the wills varies greatly, from short to several pages, depending, amongst other things, on the testatrix’s status and wealth, the production of additional documents, and the use of more detailed formulae and clauses. These features led to an increased use of charters in libelli form from the 1480s onwards. Again, the two 13th-century wills of Matilda of Sayn stand out for their time. However, later the wills of the highest ranking women contain the longest texts.31 The design and presentation of wills range from simple layouts with no graphic decoration, to more representative pieces with accentuated initials and larger, high-quality parchment sheets allowing for wider margins, to the prestigious libelli form with elaborately decorated initials and multiple seals attached to colored silk threads.32 28 See e.g. an additional document to no. 44 (HStAStuttgart, A602, no. 492/1, fol. 8v) that mentions the confessor as scribe of the will. 29 E.g. in nos. 7, 10, 13, 19, 25. 30 Bohn 2002, pp. 456–466; see also below n. 63. 31 See the wills of queens, royal daughters, the countesses Palatine of the Rhine, and Mary of Burgundy: nos. 8, 11, 12, 31, 32, 34. 32 Nos. 5, 8, 11, 31, 32, 34 with decorated initials; nos. 31, 34, 36, 38, 39, 44 with (silk) threads. 61
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