Cases of Records: the Concept of Written Evidence (HIERARCHY AND POWER IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATIONS conference, session description (original) (raw)
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RiMe. Rivista dell'Istituto di Storia dell'Europa Mediterranea (ISSN 2035-794X), 2021
Author analyses cessio, or transfer of obligation from one creditor to another as a transaction pertaining to Roman law and Roman legal tradition, in the documents of Thomasinus de Savere, a late 13th century notary in Dubrovnik (Ragusa). First he analyses cessio in doctrine and early notaries’ formularies of the 13th century as a conceptual background of the analysis. After a short historical context, documents are specifically analysed. Cessiones are approached from a threefold perspective, first generally in comparison with other documents, and then regarding their structure and contents. // L'autore analizza cessio, o il trasferimento dell'obbligazione da un creditore all'altro come transazione pertinente al diritto romano e alla tradizione giuridica romana, nei documenti di Tomasino de Savere, un notaio della fine del XIII secolo a Dubrovnik (Ragusa). Prima analizza il cessio nella dottrina e nei formulari dei primi notai del XIII secolo. Dopo un breve contesto storico, i documenti sono specificamente analizzati. Cessiones sono analizzati da una triplice prospettiva, prima generalmente in confronto con altri documenti, e poi riguardo alla loro struttura e contenuto.
The Emergence of Tradition. Essays in legal anthropology (XVI-XVIII Centuries)
The essays contained in this volume deal with some important questions concerning the relationship between the world of custom and the world that can be most precisely defined as cultivated, which found its expression in writing. For the medieval and modern periods, these questions involve a close relationship between the educated, elaborated and tendentially abstract viewpoint expressed through writing, and the one substantially tied to social practices, intimately connected to oral tradition and custom. It is not by chance that customs played a primary part in the hierarchy of sources which a judge theoretically had to take into consideration in his jurisprudential activity. The contact with the world of custom and tradition allows to see some of its most significant features, above all in the many judiciary cases produced by the ever more intrusive and classificatory activity of the ecclesiastical and secular institutions. It is possible to appreciate this aspect in many spheres of social and political life; however, it comes out most clearly in the complicated matter of marriage. The emergence of tradition, understood above all in the sense of custom and of a legal order characterized by orality and mediation, is therefore a historical and cultural phenomenon filtered in the modern period through the activity of secular and ecclesiastical institutions that aimed at regulating and constraining it within legal parameters reflecting new social and political instances. And the interpretative tool of legal anthropology helps the historian understand its scope and meanings. This collection of essays essentially intends to follow this line of interpretation, in an attempt to grasp through a varied and complex selection of judiciary cases the emergence of social practices that had long been grounded in custom and oral transmission.
D I F F პ R E N T EVIDENCE OF WRITTEN HISTORY (from prehistoric ages to 1819)
D I F F პ R E N T EVIDENCE OF WRITTEN HISTORY (from prehistoric ages to 1819); S C H R E I B G E S C H I C H T E M A L A N D პ R S (von der Urzeit bis zum Jahre 1819); P O V E S T E A S C R I S U L U I P U Ț I N D I F პ R I T Ă (din epoca preistorică până în anul 1819); I S T O R I J A ..., 2024
1. A diffპrent view of history in Ivan Birta's publications Researchers of the past, on the basis of preserved material, most often find written sources in public libraries and archives. Private collections of manuscripts from the near and especially distant past are mostly closed and there is often no clear insight into their scope and content. The famous collection, which in terms of volume and diversity belongs to the ranks of unique private archives, belongs to the Romanian professor Ivan Birta. In addition to possessing an unfathomably large number of manuscripts, over 500,000 items, he began studying and arranging material from his archive some time ago. Several editions of this kind have already appeared, revealing only a fraction of its full value and secrecy. The latest editions brings an unusually large volume of material arranged in three volumes. It has a quadrilingual title in English, German, Romanian, and Serbian, with a timeline spanning the period from prehistory to 1608: Diffȝrent Evidence of Written History; Schreibgeschichte mal andȝrs; Povestea scrisului puțin difȝrită; Istorija pisanja malo dяugačija. Next four volumes are scheduled to be printed in Berlin during 2024. For now, the first three volumes containing over 1600 pages, has been printed, with the announcement that the other will soon be in front of readers. The edition includes a corpus of works whose publication was banned by the Romanian Academy (of Science and Arts). Just as the principle of quadrilingualism was implemented in all works, being applied for an easier browsing of the multilingual content, with the mention: Banned books by the Romanian Academy; Verbotene Bücher der Rumanischen Akademie; Cărți interzise de Academia Română; Zabranjena dela Rumunske Akademije. In the introductory chapter entitled Warning to the reader; Warnung an den Leser; Avertizarea cititorului; Upozorenje za čitaoce, the author draws the attention of the readers to the fact that in Romanian scientific circles, especially in the wing of the Romanian Academy (of Sciences and Arts), he did not find understanding, and that is even more incomprehensible - opposition and condemnation were expressed towards him in connection with his efforts to show the value and importance of material from his archive through publications. In order to present what is included in the following volumes, the author indicated the wider scope, variety and method of preparation of the manuscripts: „In this work we publish manuscripts written on paper, palm leaves, papyrus, wood, stone, clay or copper plates, vellum parchment. After reproducing the original artifact in the form of high-resolution photocopies, we provide the dimensions, material characteristics, origin of the artifact (if known) and some determinants that are necessary for a better understanding of the text.”
From the perspective of an ancient historian, medievalists' struggles to define the chronicle genre and particularly to construe it in terms of medieval novelty are difficult to understand. As this article argues, the chronicle is a very old genre, in fact the oldest historical genre, with roots in the Ancient Near East. We trace the genre from those Near Eastern roots to their Greek and Latin successors and then to their eventual combination with the tradition of Hellenistic apologetic chronography in the work of Julius Africanus and Eusebius. In the Latin West, a native Roman tradition, that of lightlyannotated consular fasti known as consularia, was hybridized with chronicles on a Greek model and became the dominant form in late antiquity, indeed the only chronicle form transmitted directly to the Middle Ages. This late ancient chronicle, we conclude, is the model for all medieval development of the genre.