In fourteenth-century Provence, the volume of contracts produced by scribes known as public notaries increased rapidly from thousands each year to millions. By the fifteenth century, virtually all social and economic relations could be guaranteed by a notarial act. Reliance on the written word expanded both geographically and socially, reaching even the region's most remote rural communities and serving the interests of marginalized actors, including women, peasants, and religious minorities. This talk seeks to answer fundamental questions about this extraordinary moment in late medieval law, literacy, and technology: Why did written records become so wildly popular so quickly? What were the consequences of this rapid legal and cultural transformation? And how did the lives and logics of everyday legal actors change as a result?
Prof. Ryan Low (University of North Dakota; PhD Harvard, 2024) researches the history of information and information technologies in the Mediterranean Middle Ages. Using the massive amounts of legal and bureaucratic documents produced by late medieval notaries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he studies the rapid expansion of the written word in the form of legal contracts, especially in late medieval Provence. He treats these practical written documents as a new information technology that radically transformed how individuals throughout the medieval Mediterranean produced and consumed information related to social life and economic exchange. These transformations did not impact everyone in medieval society in the same ways, and much of his research focuses on the effects of this late medieval phenomenon on Jews, women, peasants, and artisans.
Prof. Low is also a project leader for The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, an international and interdisciplinary research project that collects, edits, and publishes lists of everyday objects recorded in late medieval household or estate inventories. He has edited dozens of archival manuscripts related to Jewish households, parish churches, and urban artisans. He has also contributed to the Historical Pharmacopeias Research Project which publishes lists of ingredients and medicaments found in pharmacies throughout Europe and the Western Hemisphere up to 1800.