La scoperta dei notai liguri negli studi medievistici tra Otto e Novecento

Ligurian notarial registers are a unique historical source, in terms of both primacy and richness (both in Italy and internationally). ,ese sources constituted a veritable testing ground into which scholars interested in the nascent medieval studies could delve. During this period scholars typically followed parallel themes: Genoese antiquarians, in particular, tended to construct vast documentary collections on speci!c themes, by drawing variable numbers of documents from di.erent cartularies. ,e only common characteristic of these approaches was the attention towards Genoese commercial and economic developments, but this intense research activity in the archives did not yield a rich output of studies. So much so that at the end of almost a century of research on notarial registers, the study of these sources was still not a main feature of studies on medieval history produced in the Ligurian milieu. ,is paper explores the background of the !rst edition (1853), carried out by Piedmontese institutions, of Giovanni scriba’s cartulary (1154) and the catalogues drawn up by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians. ,e article further describes the thematic documentary collections and studies produced by Ligurian scholars until the end of the nineteenth century, and retraces how nineteenth-century German historians exploited these sources, whether in extensive synopses or in more targeted studies. ,is is followed by an illustration of the editions prepared by Ligurian scholars during the !rst two decades of the twentieth century. ,e conclusive section of the article deals with the developments in international scholarship in medieval history during the 1920s and 30s, when new scholars started to turn their attention to these sources. In Italy, during the same period, Roberto Lopez emerged as a scholar able to identify new themes and test new methodological solutions. Finally, even the systematic publication of registers cannot be ascribed to a “centralized” program developed by the Istituto storico italiano per il medioevo.