In search of a “total” source. The major lines of research on city-dwellers’ testaments in the 13th–18th c.

Abstract

By introducing the phrase “total source” into the title of this paper, the author intends to bring to the fore the fundamental — and nowadays somewhat overlooked — role of the historians of the Annales School in redirecting research on testaments and research using testaments towards the serial history of mentalities (histoire sérielle des mentalités). Previously interesting mainly for biographers and historians of law, testaments have now become a universal type of documentation, indispensable for research on the “new history” of society, economy and culture.The article focuses on the major studies published in the 1970s and 80s which introduced the quantitative method and the questionnaires that are still applied by mediaevalists and histo-rians of the early-modern period: Michel Vovelle’s Piétébaroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIII e siècle. Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (1973) and Jacques Chiffoleau’s La comptabilité de l’au-delà. Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1320–vers 1480) (1980). The author discusses their significance and impact in the context of the methodology of serial history promoted by Annales historians (P. Chaunu, F. Braudel) and the crowning achievements of the history of mentalities concerning the history of death. Furthermore, the author surveys a range of new Anglo-American studies on the material history of the renaissance (mainly Italian). She also discusses in detail the long-established tradition of research on legacies and the recent impact of the gender turn, clearly discernible in this area and in studies on testaments in general. Briefly outlining the research on German, Polish and Czech testaments of city-dwellers, she highlights the importance of studies on source texts (their form and language, the authentication and registration of testaments). In a separate paragraph she comments on Martin Nodl’s extreme scepticism about the potential of the quan-titative method (in relation to testaments from Czech towns), which is said to be inapplicable to the documentation that cannot be considered quantitatively or socially representative in that part of late-mediaeval Europe.