Social relationships in mid-sixteenth-century Malta : an analysis through notary Juliano Muscat's register R376/11

The themes to be discussed in this paper transpire from the notarial deeds of Notary Juliano Muscat, and in particular register R376/11. This was compiled by Notary Muscat between February and August 1545, although it also includes a number of entries from 1546. In all, 330 separate acts were analysed. The volume, held at the Notarial Archives in Valletta (NAV), is written in Medieval Latin, although some Italian, Sicilian and Maltese words were used as well. Social relations in mid-sixteenth-century Malta were extensive, variable, and constantly changing. Even in a small island like Malta people lived their lives within different social settings which were nonetheless concurrent and overlapping. The nature of the source at hand, that is, the notarial register R376/11, determined the subdivision of this paper into five parts. The first part sets out a framework within which to place the lives and actions of the people who appear in the acts of Notary Muscat. The next part outlines and discusses the merits and limits of notarial acts for historical research, while providing a short biographical sketch of Notary Muscat himself. The discussion then examines social relationships in terms of two dichotomies: Employers and Employees, Masters and Slaves. The final part is concerned with gender issues, and in particular with women's lives, in the belief that notarial records can help to redress the almost complete silence that shrouds women's history in the sixteenth century.peer-reviewe

The Death of Isabella Della Volpe: Four Eyewitness Accounts of a Postmortem Caesarean Section in 1545

This article provides a transcription and translation of four notarized declarations describing the events surrounding a postmortem caesarean section performed in 1545 in Vercelli, a small city in the Duchy of Savoy. After her death in the late stages of pregnancy, Isabella della Volpe’s body was opened and her fetus excised by a local barber, aided by a surgeon and a midwife. The article argues that the postmortem caesarean section was a well-known and widely accepted procedure and that it might be motivated by financial and legal as well as religious concerns; not only was it important to baptize the child for its salvation, but the fate of the mother’s dowry, as in this case, might depend on whether she died with or without living issue.History of Scienc

SIMARA: a database for key-value information extraction from full pages

We propose a new database for information extraction from historical handwritten documents. The corpus includes 5,393 finding aids from six different series, dating from the 18th-20th centuries. Finding aids are handwritten documents that contain metadata describing older archives. They are stored in the National Archives of France and are used by archivists to identify and find archival documents. Each document is annotated at page-level, and contains seven fields to retrieve. The localization of each field is not available in such a way that this dataset encourages research on segmentation-free systems for information extraction. We propose a model based on the Transformer architecture trained for end-to-end information extraction and provide three sets for training, validation and testing, to ensure fair comparison with future works. The database is freely accessible at https://zenodo.org/record/7868059

Money supply and the credit market in early modern economies : the case of eighteenth-century Lisbon

In this paper, we address the partial equilibrium functioning of the shortterm credit market in the Eighteenth-century Lisbon and its response to three major events: massive gold inflows from Brazil, a catastrophic destruction of capital caused by the 1755 earthquake and the enactment of a 5% legal ceiling on interest rates 1757. We build a time series for the market interest rate, and a regression shows money stock and real estates as two significant variables. Interest rates were affected negatively by the former and positively by the latter. We conclude that changes in the money stock tended to operate through the supply of loanable funds. The wealth effect, measured by the stock of real estate, operated over demand and tended to be the most significant effect among several other possible countervailing effects (e.g., the impact of wealth effects on supply, the informational effects of collaterals). The inflow of gold clearly generated a liquidity which by itself explained the downward trend in interest rates up until around 1780. However, the huge variations experienced by the stock of capital after the earthquake also explains the steadiness of interest rates in a period when the inflow of money started to recede. For the whole period during which the 5 % ceiling on interest rates was in force we do not find any evidence to confirm the existence of disequilibrium credit rationing: the notional interest rate predicted by our model was very close to the 5% legal ceiling

An enquiry into the history of registration for publication in Scotland

Under the above title we comprehend an enquiry dealing with the land registers only, to which the nomen juris "Registration for Publication" is technically applied.The first part of this work is devoted to a review of the factors, particularly those of a political, economic and social character, which have played their part in the process of the evolution of the various land registers of Europe and the British Isles, excluding Scotland.Though, on a strict interpretation, this may not fall within the scope of our enquiry, nevertheless we regard this preliminary survey as of some importance if the comparative standpoint is not to be ignored; furthermore, we trust that, as a result of widening our perspective, Scotland's claim of having made a distinctive contribution in this special branch of jurisprudence will be fully substantiated

A visual data analysis for determining the geographical extent of the cabreves

The historical cadastral archives are an important source of information to help understand our cultural heritage since they contain a trace of the activities, land uses, and buildings developed by people from different periods. However, in the era of Big Data there remain many historical documents of great value that have not been digitized or studied in depth. This is the case of the cabreves, which are precatastral documents used for centuries in several regions of Spain to document those properties that were subject to the payment of taxes to a feudal lord. Rescuing these data would enable studying the landscape structure of relatively recent dates for which there is no cadastral cartography. However, it is difficult to establish the state of conservation, degree of accessibility, content detail, and quality of the archived cabreves. In recent years, progress has been made in digitizing these sources. In Spain, the Spanish Archives Portal (PARES) harmonizes and unifies the efforts of national archives, and a significant number of documents have been archived in recent years. We use text mining techniques to analyze and map the records in which cabreves appear. Out of the 1752 records found, a total of 1408 cabreves have been geocoded and mapped, enabling us to establish which territories and periods can be studied using these sources. From this experience, we request that digital archives maintain a geographical perspective during archival appraisal.This work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, project SIOSE-INNOVA (CSO2016-79420-R AEI/FEDER UE)

Challenges and Alternatives to Caribbean Family History and Genealogy: Archives and Sources in Puerto Rico.

This chapter discusses the state of genealogy in Puerto Rico, particularly regarding sources. A discussion of genetic genealogy is also included

Clerks and Scriveners: Legal Literacy and Access to Justice in Late Medieval England

Provincial town clerks and scriveners have hitherto been a neglected subject in the historiography of the legal profession, yet as this thesis demonstrates, they contributed significantly to medieval England’s legal and scribal culture. Arguing for a new definition of scriveners based on their legal and linguistic literacy, this fresh interpretation differentiates between scriveners, notaries, generic clerks and lawyers and modifies the existing tendency towards classifying scriveners purely on the basis of the work they did and the legal instruments they produced. The study not only rectifies a gap in our knowledge, but reconceptualises our understanding of the lower echelons of the legal profession by examining the work that scriveners did and the role that they played in the local legal administration of medieval England, and by extension, the ways in which they facilitated access to justice on several levels. Focussing primarily on Exeter, Bristol, Bridgwater and Southampton, this research for the first time reveals the identities of some of the many scriveners who worked outside of London and evaluates their activities in provincial England. In order to achieve this, the thesis considers the extent to which scriveners were an integral part of an urban legal service as members of the provincial secretariat. Underpinning the theoretical framework of this thesis are themes such as literacy, clerical identity and professionalization – all of which are examined through the prism of law, languages and access to justice. Grounded in a palaeographic and diplomatic approach to the manuscript sources, this research has yielded some surprising results regarding the essential role of provincial scriveners within the legal, political and administrative landscape of medieval England. Fundamentally, this thesis offers a new vision of provincial English scriveners and the influence of their work. Set against the backdrop of an increasingly ‘professional’ legal profession, the importance of provincial scriveners as the keepers and creators of legal memory is highlighted along with the impact that this had on the wider legal community of medieval England.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Acknowledging debt in Medieval England: a study of the records of Medieval Anglo-Jewish moneylending activities 1194-1276

This thesis examines a collection of 348 acknowledgements of debt, which were generated by Jewish moneylending activities between 1194 and 1275/6. It considers the legal and administrative structures within which they were produced, before analysing the transactions which they record. In particular, it follows the models which have been established for the analysis of Christian charters and applies them to what have traditionally been regarded as ‘Jewish documents’. Significantly, this thesis moves away from traditional narratives, which situate such records in the context of royal document production, to consider more fully the relationship between the Jews and the civic communities with which they lived and interacted. As a result, this study challenges traditional approaches to medieval Anglo-Jewish sources (which distinguish between the records of Church and State). This makes it possible to distinguish between the role of local, regional, and national influences on document production. Equally, the size of the corpus, which spans most of the thirteenth century, makes it possible to move away from generalised discussions which span the period under consideration to, instead, comment precisely on when and how developments occurred