Archivos de conocimiento y la cultura legal de la publicidad en la Marsella medieval

Abstract

Based on a case study of Marseille in the fourteenth century, this article argues that a foundational metaphor of medieval legal culture was publicity, even in the late medieval world where the written norms of Roman law would seem to dominate. In behaving in an open and public way, men and women managed to inscribe knowledge of basic legal facts, such as age, parentage, title, marital status, and date of death, in the public archives of memory, in an age before written archives consistently recorded such basic facts. The openness and ceremonial nature of such behavior validated and lent authority to the knowledge thereby created. In court cases, as a result, litigants sought to show not only that certain facts favored their position, but also that the facts were part of the «public voice and knowledge». To do so, they recruited witnesses from a broad social spectrum, and the composition of the witness group served to illustrate how widely spread the relevant facts were. According to this argument, the most profound change in European legal culture took place not with the shift from oral and customary law to written law, but with a later shift from easily accessible and public archives of knowledge to the incresingly private, state-controlled archives of the early modern era.