The Legal Value of Written Records for Jews and Christians in Medieval Provence

Visiting scholar Ryan Low (University of North Dakota) drew a large audience to his fascinating talk on the records produced by public notaries in late-medieval Provence. As he showed, virtually all social and economic relations could be guaranteed by a notarial act by the end of the fourteenth century, such that reliance on the written word affected even the region's most remote rural communities and served the interests of marginalized actors, including women, peasants, and religious minorities. His talk raised fundamental questions about this extraordinary moment in late medieval law, literacy, and technology: Why did written records become so wildly popular so quickly? What were the consequences of this rapid legal and cultural transformation? And how did the lives and logics of everyday legal actors change as a result? In particular, he showed that the Jewish communities of Provence used such records in much more systematic ways than did Christians, and were also stigmatized for doing so.