The Forms and Functions of Notaries’Wills in Central and Northern Italy (13th–15th Centuries)

Despite the general disregard of notaries’ wills, for several reasons they are relevant and heuristically promising resources offering a largely untapped source of research topics about the notarial profession. This paper is a first attempt to analyse these kinds of sources. In fact, notaries’ wills can allow us to consider anew certain topics that are cen- tral to the history of the notarial profession – such as the practices typi- cal of guild solidarity, which have so far been studied mainly in legislation – and also to understand some issues more specifically related to the dy- namics of documentary transmission. These include the mechanisms of devolution and post-mortem preservation of documents produced and/or held in the course of a notary’s professional activity – primarily registers of imbreviaturae, but also formularies and law codes.