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Penitentiary Evidence and Local Archive Material: The Case of Upper Italy, 1438-1484
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PENITENTIARY EVIDENCE AND LOCAL ARCHIVE MATERIAL: THE CASE OF UPPER ITALY (1438–1484) Paolo Ostinelli The records of the Apostolic Penitentiary preserved in the supplication volumes at the Vatican Archives reflect only a single moment of a longer process of supplication and therefore they must be considered as an incomplete source for the study of this particular form of contact between the partes and the central administration of the late medieval church. Since it was not necessary that the petitioners be present in person at the Roman curia, most of the requests had to be brought by other persons from their dioceses to the administrative centre of occidental Christendom, and in many cases the issuing of a letter by the Roman office did not yet mean that the corresponding grant was effective. The material of the Vatican Archives must be supplemented with local documents to reveal the antecedents, the procedural development, the reasons, and the effects of the single requests. The following observations refer to the petitions sent from northern Italy, particularly from the bishoprics in the Milanese duchy, in the period between 1438 and 1484.1 For this span of time we can use the registers of the Penitentiary and of a reasonably great number of local sources directly concerning the supplicants and their requests to the curial office. The aim of this contribution is to compare these different types of documents. The first part will illustrate the nature of the local material and will be fol1 The definition of the boundaries of the Milanese duchy for this article considers the political situation of about 1450 to 1460, including therefore the dioceses of Alessandria, Bobbio, Como, Cremona, Lodi, Luni and Sarzana, Milan, Novara, Parma, Pavia, Piacenza, and Tortona: see Gianluca Battioni, “Censimento ed edizione di documenti pontifici relativi alla provvista beneficiaria delle diocesi padane,” Schifanoia. Notizie dell'Istituto di studi rinascimentali di Ferrara 4 (1987), 151-164, and the introduction to the volume of Michele Ansani (ed.), Camera apostolica, I: Documenti relativi alle diocesi del ducato di Milano: i «libri annatarum» di Pio II e Paolo II (1458–1471), Materiali di storia ecclesiastica lombarda, secoli XIV–XVI, 1 (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli , 1994). On the Milanese state and its dioceses in this period see Giancarlo Andenna, Renato Bordone , Francesco Somaini, Massimo Vallerani (ed.), Comuni e signorie nell'Italia settentrionale: la Lombardia (Turin : UTET, 1998); Livio Antonielli and Giorgio Chittolini (ed.), Storia della Lombardia, 1: Dalle origini al Seicento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003); Adriano Caprioli, Antonio Rimoldi, Luciano Vaccaro (ed.), Storia religiosa della Lombardia, 12 vols. (Brescia: La Scuola, 1986–1998). PAOLO OSTINELLI 8 lowed by an analysis of both the Roman and the local records from the perspective of their heuristic and diplomatic value. Through the observation of the mass of requests and their procedural development, it will be outlined how the local documents can be helpful in defining the role of the diocesan bureaucracy in putting people from the different dioceses in contact with the central Roman administration. LOCAL ARCHIVAL SOURCES RELATED TO THE PENITENTIARY SUPPLICATIONS A large variety of documents relating to the Penitentiary supplications can be found in the diocesan and other ecclesiastical archives, notarial archives and some private archives of Lombardy. These documents can be divided into two main groups: the first includes the Penitentiary documents preserved in the local archives, the second contains the acts concerning the requests which were produced in partibus. As for the first group, the researcher can essentially expect to find four kinds of issues: • The original letters sent in the name of the Major Penitentiary to the supplicants (when the grant was given in forma gratiosa) or to the commissioners (when given in forma commissoria).2 The chance of finding such documents in Lombard archives is rather small; a systematic research for the diocese of Como brought to light only two original letters against 630 entries in the Penitentiary registers.3 For the other dioceses likewise it cannot be expected to discover more than a small number of isolated pieces. • In particular cases the Penitentiary also accorded some kinds of grants handing over to the supplicants their original supplications after the approval per sola signatura.4 The fact that this kind of document only survived exceptionally after the death of the petitioners can be confirmed by the completely unsuccessful preliminary surveys in the public archives of the twelve dioceses in the Milanese state. 2 Ludwig Schmugge, “Penitentiary Documents from Outside the Penitentiary,” in The Long Arm of Papal Authority: Late...