«Dell'officio della scrittora». Fra fides e custodia: 'monache scrivane' e notai a Verona nei secoli XVII e XVIII

Abstract

Current Diplomatics embrace every form of documentary evidence and investigate the legal implication of documentation. This article investigates the different ways those scripts were created, stored, and ordered for both immediate and future use in the nunneries of Verona’s diocese during the Modern Age. The institutional and juridical system (Republic of Venice, Papacy, as the ecclesiastical law and canon law) have a direct impact in the multiplication of records, in the production and preservation of large quantities of documents, fastened in fascicolo and volumina inside the nunnery’s scriptoria and archives. A detailed examination of written documents demonstrates the network existing between the religious written culture and notarial one: notaries and nuns were scribes involved in the production of documentary sources (preparatory notes, protocols, notarial notebook, memoranda and imbreviaturae). Consequently, together with the notaries, the nuns took part in the written production of their convent. And so, notaries, who might have many scribes in their employ, traced their personal sign and wrote the final formula known as the completio on the instrumenta which were in authentic form or in copy bounded (or registered) in libri-documento. We don’t know much about these nun writers (‘monache scrittore’), but from their written production we can learn some details of history of documentation. These works, together with the letters, the libri instrumentorum, the diaries, the daybook, the rent rolls and the convent chronicles relate the role these scripts played in the juridical and institutional debate during the Modern Age.