Political and Legal
Sources
Renaissance Research Project
• “it is the physical repository of the
government’s omniscience, at once a
symbol and an instrument of its
efficiency” [Filippo De Vivo]
•“in its quiet folders and bundles it is the
neatest demonstration of how state
power has operated, through ledgers
and lists and indictments, and through
what is missing from them” [Carolyn
Steedman]
Paleography
State Archive, Naples
The Development of
State Archives
• “any public authority, if it is to be
considered legitimate and exercise social
control adequately, must rigourously
conserve, order and verify its written
information” [Gian Maria Varanini]
• chancelleries produce written documents
• organisation
• need for secrecy
Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici
Documents produced
by the state
• communal statutes
• deliberative/legislative
councils
• offices/magistracies
• Venetian Provveditori alle
pompe - to enforce
sumptuary laws
• territorial expansion
Ambassadors’ relazioni
• Florentine catasto of
1427 (used by
Klapisch Zuber and
Herlihy; Padgett)
Court records
• different courts: civil,
criminal, church
• speech into writing
• power relationships
• lawyers, judges,
notaries shaping
speech
• dialect to Italian/Latin
Inquisition
• from 1540s
• Protestants then
“judaizers”, witchcraft,
superstitious practices,
censorship
• circulation of
ideas/books/people
Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi, 1573
• ideal of justice
• recourse to courts
• “adversarial literacy”
• pardon letters (studied
by Natalie Zemon
Davis)
• narrative structures
a notary’s mark
Wills
• personal networks,
possessions, piety
• Cohn: effect of
Black Death
• Chojnacki:
Venetian patrician
women’s use of
wills
• records of speech
• standard formulae vs
personal touches
• presence of witnesses