Author: Burns, Robert I.
Title: Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250 1350
Description: Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996. 278 pp., Fine copy. Hardcover with dustjacket. Middle Ages Sephardic history. In the rapidly transforming world of thirteenth-century Mediterranean Spain, the all-purpose scribe and contract lawyer known as the notary became a familiar figure. Most legal transactions of the Roman Law Renaissance were framed in this functionary's notoriously hasty shorthand. Notarial archives, then, offer a remarkable window on the daily life of this pluri-ethnic society. Robert I. Burns brings together the testimony of a multitude of documents, and transcribes in full nearly fifty will-related charters prepared by notaries, to give a never-before-seen view of Jewish society in that place and time. Wills can display the religious conscience, ethical institutions, social mobility, and property dynamics of whole groups or regions. Even a single testament allows a glimpse into the testator's family and into the life and times of the living person. ISBN: 9780520203938

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