From Assembly to Archive: The Documentary Revolution in Medieval Venice

Abstract

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, societies across Latin Europe underwent a momentous shift away from ritualistic, consensus-driven models of justice toward new legal systems defined by academic jurisprudence, centered on written records, and mediated by emerging state structures. This transition depended on the rise of a novel infrastructure of information, rooted in changes in how legal documents were created, authenticated, preserved, and deployed. Documentary legitimacy, once bestowed in public rituals before church portals and fixed in communal memory, came instead to be conferred by legal professionals operating through courts, archives, and private documentary practice. This dissertation investigates the social and material conditions behind that change. Drawing on the unique collection of early commercial documents preserved in Venetian archives alongside thousands of more typical records concerning property rights, it reveals the often-overlooked role played by capital derived from long-distance trade in local redefinitions of legal norms, documentary practices, power, and property. Chapter 1 examines the southern lagoon settlement of Chioggia, where older forms of communal validation and their breakdown are especially visible. Chapter 2 investigates the documentary culture of maritime trade, tracing how flexible systems of single-sheet proof eventually gave way to centralized, register-based forms of record-keeping that concentrated legal advantage in the hands of wealthy investors. Chapter 3 turns to the northern lagoon, analyzing how emigration to the growing urban center at the Rialto reconfigured local legitimacy and documentary practice. Chapter 4 shows how monastic institutions translated profits from overseas commerce into territorial power on the mainland through finance, documentary expertise, and institutional permanence. By reconstructing the legal strategies of ecclesiastical and aristocratic landlords, merchants, artisans, and rural laborers, the dissertation shows how administrative norms evolved not through top-down reform but through the accumulation of pragmatic choices, institutional improvisations, and personal negotiations. Over time, relatively minor changes in documentary routines prompted by changing social and economic circumstances redefined valid proof, transformed property relations, and laid the groundwork for a new administrative order.