| Medieval notaries wrote documents to record transactions, arrangements, and proceedings. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they contributed to the rise of the profit economy and made capital growth possible, as merchants, bankers and artisans used notarial contracts to extend credit. Families began to use new legal formulas in notarial contracts to organize their relationships and wealth. Government administrations became increasingly complex as their reliance on written records and notaries grew. In particular, notaries and written records shaped urban society of the northern Italian city-states.;Most studies on the medieval Italian notariate focus on the techniques of notarial practice, the juridical authority of notarial documents, and the institutional organization of notaries. My goal is to shift this focus. Changes in techniques of notarial practice and in the institutional organization of notaries were part of a spectrum of change in medieval Italian urban society.;My study focuses on the notaries of Bologna. I reconstruct notarial families—the Bambaglioli, the Rovisi, the Gatti and the Angelelli—and the daily activities of notaries in Bologna in order to examine the networks of notarial families and their economic interests, and the role of notaries in the guild and popular government as a notarial identity emerged during the thirteenth century.;I focus on the last decades of the thirteenth century, when Bologna's revolutionary guild-based republican government rose and disenfranchised urban magnate families. This popular government, in part led by notaries, provided an important context for reform of the notaries' guild and notarial practice, which were central to the popular political program.;Notaries' familial strategies, professional associations, and daily activities in Bologna suggests that the popular worldview was different from that of thirteenthcentury magnate families, who followed the equation of the elitist political formula kin [parenti], friends [amici], and neighbors [vicini], building neighborhood enclaves and private forms of power. Instead, the strategies, associations, and work of the notaries of Bologna suggest that popolani followed the formula kin [parenti], associates [soci], guild [corporazione], and government [Popolo], supporting commercial activities instead of neighborhood enclaves and favoring the centralization of authority over private forms of power. |
