For more information on all events, please contact Carol Symes (symes@illinois.edu).
The Legal Value of Written Records for Jews and Christians in Medieval Provence
Thursday, November 6th at 5:00pm in the Lucy Ellis Lounge (1080 LCLB)
In fourteenth-century Provence, the volume of contracts produced by scribes known as public notaries increased rapidly from thousands each year to millions. By the fifteenth century, virtually all social and economic relations could be guaranteed by a notarial act. Reliance on the written word expanded both geographically and socially, reaching even the region's most remote rural communities and serving the interests of marginalized actors, including women, peasants, and religious minorities. This talk seeks to answer 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?