Discourse on notarial documents and a reading of six teenthcentury wills from Crete: formulae and factors affecting their develop ment
Abstract
This is part of my longstanding investigation of notarial documents as historical sources that illuminate several aspects of the societies that produced them. In the present case the issue under examination is ba sed on 240 published testaments drawn up in 16thcentury Venetian Crete: in an attempt to consider the testators’ attitudes towards death, some questions are posed and discussed, focusing on the possibility that the notaries influenced the content of the last will and testament as oppo
sed to the likelihood of the act being most of all a compilation of the stereotypical phrases in which notarial documents abound. As an example, the very common formula about the unexpectedness and inevita bility of death is examined in some detail. By way of conclusion a compa rison was subsequently made with extant models of Byzantine wills and the conceptual and linguistic similarities are attributed to a common «customary consciousness».
Article Details
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ΚΑΣΔΑΓΛΗ Α. (2019). Discourse on notarial documents and a reading of six teenthcentury wills from Crete: formulae and factors affecting their develop ment. Mnimon, 35(35), 43–62. https://doi.org/10.12681/mnimon.20052
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- Vol. 35 (2016): Μνήμων
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