Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy

Roisin Cossar

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780674971899
• eBook ISBN: 9780674978669
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Roisin Cossar brings a new perspective to the history of the Christian church in fourteenth century Italy by examining how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the arrival of the Black Death.

Priests at the end of the Middle Ages resembled their lay contemporaries as they entered into domestic relationships with women, fathered children, and took responsibility for managing households, or familiae. Cossar limns a complex portrait of daily life in the medieval clerical familia that traces the phases of its development. Many priests began their vocation as apprentices in the households of older clerics. In middle age, priests fully embraced the traditional role of paterfamilias—patriarchs with authority over their households, including servants and, especially in Venice, slaves. As fathers they endeavored to establish their illegitimate sons in a clerical family trade. They also used their legal knowledge to protect their female companions and children against a church that frowned on such domestic arrangements and actively sought to stamp them out.

Clerical Households in Late Medieval Italy refutes the longstanding charge that the late medieval clergy were corrupt, living licentious lives that failed to uphold priestly obligations. In fashioning a domestic culture that responded flexibly to their own needs, priests tempered the often unrealistic expectations of their superiors. Their response to the rigid demands of church reform allowed the church to maintain itself during a period of crisis and transition in European history.

PART I

MAKING RECORDS

THIS INVESTIGATION of the history of the clerical family first considers the role of the archive and its records as players in the story. Instead of simply reflecting historical lived experience back to us, the archive participates in that experience.¹ For some, the idea that written records involving the clerical household are complicit in shaping our understanding of our historical subjects might undermine the status of the archival record as a credible source. However, this idea allows us to expand our analysis of those records to encompass their making, bringing record-makers into the story and ultimately enriching it.

CHAPTER ONE

Notaries, Registers, and Archives

THIS BOOK traces representations of the clerical household in the notarial records and archives of fourteenth-century Italian cities. Conversations and negotiations between notaries and their clerical clients shaped how information about those clients appears in the archive.¹ In order to understand the clerical household, then, we need first to examine the culture of notaries and the records they made. Notarial culture took many forms across the Italian peninsula, but in every community the notariate, regardless of their legal and social status, exercised a similar function. That is, notaries were responsible for the interpretation of the law for the benefit of their clients while maintaining community standards. The written records created by both lay and clerical notaries in the Venetian lagoon and on the Italian mainland all reflected those interpretive efforts. The work of notaries, then, was united by its fundamentally hermeneutical aspect. Any work based on notarial records needs to begin with such an understanding of the role of the profession.

Notaries

As paralegal professionals, notaries created documents that could be used as evidence before the courts during the Middle Ages and early modern periods.² Notaries were so numerous and active in southern Europe that Daniel Lord Smail has argued that their relationships with the inhabitants of late medieval communities “rival[ed] the contact between the clergy and the Christian population.”³ From the twelfth century on, notaries across Italy and in other parts of Mediterranean Europe were also deemed “official truth-tellers,” since in most places they enjoyed publica fides, meaning that they were personally responsible for authenticating their documents.⁴ Those officially sanctioned records, known as instrumenta, required certain precisely recorded details: a list of witnesses’ names, specific information about the time and place a record was created, and the identification of the notary himself, using his special sign, or signum. These common features of the records emphasized the preeminence of the notary as guarantor of their credibility as well as his independence as an authority.⁵

Publica fides was first invested in the notary (by an authority such as the emperor, his agent, or a bishop) so that he could create the notarized act, or instrumentum. The concept also reflected and influenced expectations about his social status in the community.⁶ Across Italy, notaries took an active role in maintaining traditions and power structures within their communities. They could be found observing funeral ceremonies for their employers to ensure that mourners followed sumptuary rules about funeral displays, they dashed about during epidemics to ensure that the dying could make their wills, and they were important members of political organizations and religious associations such as confraternities.⁷ In Bergamo, numerous chapters of the statutes of the local College of Notaries, founded in 1264, emphasize the need for the notary to act as a trustworthy authority who could be relied on for his loyalty and discretion to the state. The statutes also underscore the need for notaries to work professionally and to submit themselves to those in political power. For instance, notaries were warned not to prepare instrumenta for those who had been exiled and not to become involved in transactions that contravened the honor of the commune (contra honorem comunis).⁸ They were further instructed not to make “pacts” to prepare records to favor one political faction over another.⁹ The statutes of the college also asked notaries to provide other forms of support to the government. Rather startlingly, they were to be prepared to act as an armed force if civic leaders were threatened.¹⁰

The preceding discussion describes notarial roles on the Italian mainland. Scholars who write the history of the notariate frequently draw a distinction between mainland notaries and the several hundred notaries who worked in Venice during the fourteenth century. However, one important argument of this book is that the gap between mainland Italian and Venetian notaries has been overstated.¹¹ Examining notaries in northern Italy reveals significant areas of overlap between Venetian and mainland notarial practices, even though the legal cultures of those places were distinct from each other. This overlap can be difficult to discern, since Venetian notaries differed from their mainland counterparts in two particularly visible ways. First, Venetian notaries were never granted publica fides; that is, they did not have independent authority to authenticate their documents. Those notaries’ lack of publica fides meant that throughout the Middle Ages, witness signatures continue to appear on Venetian notarial records to establish the authenticity of those records, just as they had everywhere in the early Middle Ages. A second distinction between mainland and Venetian notaries was that the majority of notaries in Venice were clerics in major orders who also served the city’s churches.¹² Rules against clerical involvement in the notariate, common elsewhere from the twelfth century, were not enforced in Venice until the fifteenth century.¹³

One conventional explanation for the distinctive status of the Venetian notariate is the particular needs of the state it served. By relying on supposedly celibate cleric-notaries, historians argue, the Venetian republic avoided the development of corporatist or kin-based interests that might threaten the precarious harmony of the republic.¹⁴ Maria Pia Pedani Fabris contends instead that the choice of the cleric-notary in Venice rested on the desire for a bureaucracy independent of imperial authority.¹⁵ Others considering the appeal of notarial work to the clergy in Venice posit that such work allowed the mass of underemployed priests in the city to earn extra income.¹⁶

A related explanation of the peculiarity of the Venetian notariate focuses on the singular nature of the law in Venice.¹⁷ Across the Italian peninsula, notaries worked with legal formularies originating from the law school at Bologna, where Roman law had been revived in the eleventh century.¹⁸ By contrast, many historians have long argued that the Venetian legal system ignored Roman law and instead favored custom, Christian Scripture, and “natural justice,” as well as the personal moral views of its judges.¹⁹ Others, especially legal historians, have countered this idea with examples of the influence of Roman law on Venetian statutes and custom.²⁰ Whether Venetian legal practice rejected Roman models completely, it is certainly the case, as Guido Ruggiero notes, that law in Venice was only a “general framework” that could be applied selectively to individual cases in the courts.²¹ Notaries in Venice thus worked within a fluid legal context, and only Venetian statutes and the officials of the Cancelleria Inferiore stipulated how certain aspects of notarial records, including the date, time, and place of redaction, were to be described.²² All these perspectives on the Venetian notariate assume that it was a unitary group whose professional culture was heavily regulated by civic authorities.²³

Distinctions between Venetian and mainland notaries are also evident in the form of the records they made and the terminology used to refer to them. Notaries were responsible for turning an oral agreement into a written text, and how they did so varied from one community to the next.²⁴ Usually, when a notary met with his client to record a transaction, he took quick notes of its basic details, such as the participants’ names, the date, and the outlines of the agreement, including the property transferred and promises made. Outside Venice, he would also carefully note the exact site where the agreement was made. The notary then developed these notes, called notulae on the mainland and prex in Venice, into longer versions of a record, which he entered into registers known as imbreviatura or protocolli or quaderni. He would normally draw up an “extracted” version of the record on parchment only if he were paid for that purpose by his clients. This final version of the completed record was known as an instrumentum on the mainland and a cartula in Venice.²⁵ Some types of acts were specific to the place they were drawn up. For instance, agreements to manumit or free slaves were mainly seen in Venice. Others were more broadly used, including quittances for debt (quietanze), receipts (cartae securitatis), promissory notes (cartae manifestationis), the occasional peace act, guardianship contracts, and, everywhere, overwhelming numbers of testaments (testamenti). What remains for the historian to discover varies from one place to another, with perhaps the greatest variety of records found in the Venetian notarial archives. While in most places notaries discarded the slips of paper containing those notes after they drew up the more complete forms of their records in their registers, in Venice many loose papers containing annotated and corrected drafts of testaments survive. In addition, Venetian testators could draw up their own wills on loose sheets (cedole), which would then be deposited with a notary and turned into legal records with the appropriate formulas. For this reason, in the registers of testaments in the Venetian archives we often find wills written in both Latin (by the notary) and the vernacular (originally by the testator and retained in this form when written into the register). Venetian notaries also commonly collected testaments in separate registers to be handed over to the authorities, while for their own work purposes, they drew up “calendars” of other transactions, heavily abbreviated records that crowd onto the parchment pages of bound registers.

The absence of publica fides for the Venetian notariate, the preponderance of cleric-notaries in the city, the peculiar legal context in which they worked, and the distinctive form of many of their surviving records have led many scholars to view notaries in the lagoon and their peninsular peers as two solitudes. However, comparing the work cultures of Venetian and mainland notaries breaks down the barriers between the two groups and underscores their functional similarities. For instance, both in Venice and on the mainland, notaries had to carefully mind their professional reputations and earn the community’s trust for themselves and their records. On the mainland, publica fides could be removed from a notary’s records if he created an instrument for someone close to him (and thus stood to profit from it) or if he was suspected of having broken the law.²⁶ Similarly, the Venetian government required that all of its notaries demonstrate “good habits,” a stipulation not that materially different from the professional expectations on mainland notaries.²⁷ In both places, notaries had to act with caution to maintain their status and the legal value of their records.

Connections between the culture of Venetian and mainland notaries are further evident when we examine ecclesiastical toleration for cleric-notaries in mainland Italy throughout the Middle Ages. At no time did church officials completely prohibit clerics from undertaking notarial training or redacting notarial documents. For example, in 1211, Innocent III told the bishop of Ascoli Piceno to excommunicate all clerics acting as notaries in that diocese. But Innocent’s chief aim, Martina Cameli argues, was not to stop clerics from working as notaries but rather to prevent them from earning money from their activities.²⁸ Similarly, the 1264 statutes of the notarial college in Bergamo sought to limit, but not prohibit, clerics from redacting public acts. While the statutes stated that clerics were not to create, redact, or register records, they also allowed those who had become clerics after having worked as notaries to “extract” fair copies of instrumenta from their registers.²⁹ Furthermore, clerics who swore the usual oath to the college, promising to redact their instruments “in good faith and without fraud,” could also work as notaries.³⁰ The leaders of the college were to search the city and outlying areas to force any cleric exercising the notarial office to either resign or swear the oath.³¹ In other fourteenth-century mainland cities, bishops sometimes allowed clerics to work as notaries if they obtained a license from the episcopacy. In 1360, the bishop of Padua instituted a ten-lire “penalty” for clerical notaries working without such a license.³² The relative flexibility of these statements led to a significant number of clerics working as notaries on the Italian mainland in cities including Bergamo, Treviso, and Udine, and in communities in the regions of Piemonte and the Marche.³³

Notaries across the pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Making Records
• Part II: The Clerical Familia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index