Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (review)

For historians of premodern Europe, trust is becoming ever more a subject of great interest. For political agents, merchants, and artisans and for all men and women in their daily dealings, knowing just when to trust just whom for what was a pressing concern, as our modern institutions of enforcement and verification were acutely scarce. Medieval and early modern Europeans therefore sought remedy in devices that extorted guarantees: hostages, sureties, and pledges that might put a protagonist's body, goods, kinsfolk, honor, or soul in hock. It was the classic weak-state gambit: "upon my honor"; "I pledge this sum as guarantee"; "may I roast in hell if ever I let you down." Commerce often used such measures but had other means as well; we study the capacity of long-distance traders to establish trust, even among strangers, via portable reputation, theirs by virtue of their trade, the whole mercantile community serving as a tacit collective jury. Communal talk, producing what courts called fama [reputation], was both a social fact and potent legal evidence, often cited in trials.

Meanwhile, alongside these varied hostages, there was paper, a second device for binding persons and reinforcing social and economic undertakings. In the postclassical West, paper and parchment staked a growing role in defining truth. Paper had advantages over fama as, unlike talk and memory—though records might burn, shred, or molder—it never wavered. So long as the document was there, it testified. But paper had two main problems. For one, unlike memory, it could vanish entirely, destroyed, lost, purloined, or hidden and thus knock all props from claims. For another, skilled cheats could forge documents and did so often. Whence the rise of the notary, a skilled drafter of documents—held by the thirteenth-century ars notaria [notarial art] to write things right and keep a master copy—to assure memory's immortality on paper.

Laurie Nussdorfer's book treats the notaries of a special Italian city, Rome, from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, expounding a history at once institutional, legal, social, and economic. What marks Rome out, among Italian cities, is its double regime, the waning city at the Capitol and the papacy, increasingly competent and assertive, at the Vatican. The evolving notaries were perennially entangled in the middle, but the church, as local state, more and more set their rules. Nussdorfer, a canny and experienced historian of Rome, knows its values, habits, laws, and institutions by heart. She writes handsomely and lays out the notarial realm with patience and great skill.

In Roman notarial history, 1586 was a turning point. Till then, notaries had been free agents, entrepreneurial sellers of documentary services who came and went at will. They were loosely linked in a guild that has left few papers and seemingly lacked power. Some notaries moved in the orbit of the church, with its abundant legal traffic, while others gravitated to the civic regime, while Romans, for business, picked and chose notaries at will. Then, without warning, Pope Sixtus V put civic notarial offices up for sale; he set their number at thirty and pocketed a fat first payment. Nevertheless, within a quarter century, these offices were nearly freehold, readily sold by the owner, or his heirs, and the notaries' collegio vetted candidates. Tenure was not quite free; holders paid the collegio monthly to fund its customary gifts and annual payments to pope and city in recompense for the collective right to office. An office was not cheap; buyers might take years to make good the purchase. Meanwhile, the owner ran his practice or, very often, subcontracted it to another. Here, notaries differed little from other premodern officials.

How did a notary make a living? Two ways: for one, he offered documentary services, drawing up a multitude of papers, at a fixed page rate, posted, as per statute, on the office wall; for another, he was a custodian of memory who...