ABSTRACT
Many, if not most, aspects of Mediterranean life were carried out within the context of a written, legal culture facilitated by notaries who lived and worked in cities and rural areas. Since the mid-thirteenth century, Bologna had been a center of notarial culture for the Italian peninsula and, indeed, for much of southwestern Europe, because the principal formularies used by notaries practicing throughout the western Mediterranean were produced by professors of notarial law in Bologna, viz., Salatiele and Rolandino Passagieri.1 In the city of Bologna itself, notaries dominated politics, administration, and the courts, serving as secretaries and offi cers in the halls of justice, government, and civic bureaucracy.2 They were present throughout the streets, markets, homes, and churches writing up the testaments and the many types of contracts (loans, sales, rentals, apprenticeship, guardianship, dowry, peace, compromise, arbitration, and more) that permeated the daily life of townspeople from all social levels. Notaries also populated rural areas, writing up whatever contracts the peasants needed. As Edward Muir has proposed, notarial culture may have had a larger impact than religious culture on the largely illiterate countryside, because educated priests were rare, whereas the itinerant notary was commonplace.3 The rich notarial archives of Bologna and other Italian urban centers have generated many detailed studies of urban life, but, despite the recognition that notaries also served the needs of residents living in the contado (the rural district subject to the city), scholars have undertaken fewer examinations of the notarial records in these areas. Developments in Italian medieval rural society and economy were certainly fundamental to those of the city, yet scholarship still shines its spotlight mainly on cities, leaving the larger and more populous rural areas in the dark.4 Within these under-studied areas, the lives of women remain almost entirely hidden.
