Notarial Information and the Production of Knowledge in Rural Society

Abstract

One of the most dramatic transformations of the lives of everyday people in medieval Europe was the sudden and widespread increase in the number of written contracts at the turn of fourteenth century. To give a sense of the magnitude of change, in the former county of Provence in southeastern France, the volume of contracts grew by several orders of magnitude from the thousands in 1300 to the millions just a century later. Everyday men and women from different socio-economic classes, professional backgrounds, and religious faiths all sought out the services of scribes known as public notaries to compose written documents. This dissertation explores how notaries managed the massive amounts of information that filled tens of thousands of registers and cartularies throughout the later Middle Ages. Drawing upon hundreds of unpublished manuscript codices and over 20,000 notarial contracts from southeastern France, the dissertation argues that an unintentional but powerful appeal of notarial contracts lay in their capacity to compress, store, and circulate the information that guaranteed a vast array of interpersonal and legal relationships. The effects of this information revolution transformed medieval social and economic life by expanding the possibilities for how individuals, families, ecclesiastical institutions, and political entities could form the relationships that constituted late medieval society.