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The aim of this paper is to reconsider the use of “paper", from the raw materials to the writing sheet. An ephemeral material, the paper, but pervasive and malleable, paper is used for a variety of purposes, suitable to answer the demand for devotional objects or tools for public ceremonies. What has come down to us, in many cases, are objects quite difficult to compare but worth to be studied since they are suitable to provide an unusual perspective on the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance Italy and lead to a revaluation of the paper as a powerful means of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Passio Miniatis, both BHL 5965 (8th/9th c.) and BHL 5967 (11th c.), recently edited by Silvia Nocentini (2018). In the first part the paper deals with the main features of the new edition; in the second part it raises some historical questions on these texts. In particular, the paper proposes to analyse the Passio in the context of Italic political networks, both in the Carolingian age and in the years of the Emperor Henry II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the historical foundation of rumours about the illegitimate birth of messer Bernardo Machiavelli, Niccolò's father. Although these rumours begun spreading during the writer's life, they have been in fact largely neglected by Machiavelli biographers. In the first part of the paper a new survey of the records pertaining to both Bernardo and his ancestors offers fresh evidence to support his illegitimate status. The second part of the paper shows to what extent, in the political turmoil following the introduction of the Consiglio Maggiore in late 1494, Bernardo's illegitimacy prevented Niccolò from actively participating in the Florentine political life of his time, allowing him to pursue only a career of a strictly executive nature in the city's administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tries to analyze methods for individual age certification in 13th-14th Italian city-states, where civil life depended on thresholds of age, which the principal one was of course the age of majority, such as everywhere at anytime. Legal sources as Artes notariae and jurists as Bartolo and Baldo confronted with judiciary documents and normative sources put evidence on two ways of certification, the aspectus corporis performed by the judge and the denumeratio annorum proved by oath and witnesses, which allowed the judge to pronounce its sentence, the instrumentum annorum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this article are the interactions between political forces in Orvieto and in Bagnoregio, a small town under the authority of government of Orvieto, in 1303 and 1304. In these two years, the faction in Bagnoregio that attacked the podestà from Orvieto cooperates with the political opposition in Orvieto. These two political forces need to coordinate their efforts in different places and in different institutions to collaborate and fight against the ruling coalition of Orvieto. The paper analyzes how this forces try to integrate their actions that took place in several arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay represents the fourth stage of a study dedicated to literary texts and the relationship with the chamber of acts of the municipality of Bologna in the last quarter of the 14th century. The article reconstructs the tradition of the superfund of the deliberations of the city’s municipal councils and at the same time investigates the articulation of the political discourse of the government of the people. At the heart of the contribution are the articulating of political language and the invention of the tradition of remembrance in relation to archival papers, the municipal documentary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper conducts a study on a notarial protocol conserved in the Florence State Archive which contains about five hundred acts drawn up by the Florentine notary ser Bonaccorso di Gerino del Cacciato for the Florence cathedral chapter between 1340 and 1346. The objective is the reconstruction of the aforesaid notary professional profile and the description of the institutional structure, the administrative activities and the complex of the land and estate properties of the Florentine cathedral chapter in the years preceding the Black Death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the reconstruction of theoretical and practical teaching for surgeons as well as practical training for physicians in the Florentine Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Heterogeneous and unpublished sources are discussed that confirm the hypothesis of an educational function already present at the end of the sixteenth century under the Grand Duke Francesco I (the oldest document has hitherto been from 1630). These documents integrate the names of the first doctors with explicit teaching assignments and suggest that ‘medici astanti' could be assigned didactic tasks as early as the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the question of the social condition of women in 14th century Gubbio. In the footsteps of recent historiography, the main goal of this paper is to spot similarities and differences between the legal status of women according to the local Statuto and the practical behaviours reconstructed through the analysis of notarial records. The result is a complex framework in which the law was not always able to restrain the agency of women: married or widowed, noble or popolari, the women of Gubbio managed to retain a significant level of freedom by owning and conducting real properties, making wills, and working, especially in textile manufacture, farming and hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albertanus of Brescia is considered one of the greatest Italian intellectuals of the first half of the 13th century. Judge, politician, rhetorician, he was the author of three treatises and of five sermons. His works were real 'best sellers', both in their original compilation in Latin, and in numerous vernacular versions spread all across Europe. This paper will focus on the minor works of Albertanus, the five sermons that he wrote within a confraternal context. Albertanus' sermons contain insights of remarkable interest, both for the anticipation or perfecting of topics that we find in the treatises, and for themes that seem to find privileged place in the homiletic support, as the issue of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing both placita and private charters preserved in ecclesiastical archives, the aim of this paper is to study the role played by local officials in the construction of political consensus within rural societies in Emilia between the reigns of Louis the Pious and Berengar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the process of progressive feminization of labor that occurred during the seventeenth century in the silk industry in Lucca and Florence. The gender division of labor that took place there, as in other production centers of central and northern Italy, was achieved by reserving the less complex and demanding jobs for women. Over time, this resulted in a significant reduction in wages - which in the case of Lucca is well documented by archival sources - and in a loss of social prestige for the weavers, who had been the élite of the urban artisan class for centuries. In both Lucca and Florence, the mid-century economic crisis had devastating effects on the artisans' domestic stability. Both cities experienced episodes of protest, which in Florence, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, took on distinctly feminine overtones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two guard sheets of the ms. Vat. Lat. 773 are a fragment of a Florentine notarial register. The bifolium belonged to ser Iacopo, son of ser Alberto Amizzini, and is datable between 1289 and 1292; these are the main findings of this paper, which also reconstructs the professional activity of ser Iacopo, discusses the transmission of the fragment and gives, in the Appendix, the edition of the 26 extant contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the procedures of documentary production and archival preservation of the institutions defending state jurisdiction against ecclesiastical institutions in the pre-unification Italian States. The aim is to prove the existence of a common modus operandi in the archival practice of each jurisdiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the role played by businessmen in the socio-economic and socio-political mobility of Italian cities between the mid-fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. This paper, based largely on the most innovative results of recent historiography, aims to modify the traditional view of the late Italian Middle Ages as an era characterized by the decline of entrepreneurial dynamism and the re-emergence of social models based on aristocratic prominence. It becomes evident that the model of the urban oligarchic governments is a later reality matured in the modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing the historiography regarding medieval fortifications, this paper aims to examine the lesser-known spaces of Renaissance warfare, such as arsenals, foundries, and forges. The context of this analysis is the Florentine Republic of the fifteenth century, whose statesmen have often been blamed for their lack of interest in warfare. Nevertheless, a study of the primary sources produced by the military institutions of the Republic reveals the crucial importance of the role played by the public demand in the construction of new manufacturing facilities, in the introduction of technical innovations, in the trade of materials, in the circulation of craftsmen, and in the formation of their practical skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze some aspects of Brescia's civic life during the first Venetian age, with particular reference to the laudes urbium written in the period of maximum development of the local humanistic thought. Specifically, the laudes of Brescia composed by humanists such as Ubertino Posarlo, Paolo Attivanti, Marino Becichemo, Taddeo Sdazio and Ottaviano Corsini have been investigated. From their pages emerges, above all, an unconditional hymn of praise to justice and rhetoric, seen as necessary elements for the construction of the city's political life after its incorporation in the Republic of Venice in 1426. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the life of Friar Stephen of Spain OP, the first member of a mendicant order to become archbishop of Torres. Stephen became Saint Dominic's confessor, and then prior of the province of Lombardy from 1225 to 1236. Relevant information concerning Friar Stephen's life and career are presented, including his important role in the Inquisition and, later on, his participation in the diplomatic delegation that the commune of Pisa and the Archbishop Federico Visconti sent to Castile to recognize Alfonso X as King and obtain important commercial privileges and military assistance in Tuscany.