Gender across Genre Boundaries in Notarial Registers of Medieval Bologna

This paper examines the shapes of gender in the pages of a notarial office called the Memoriali Bolognesi. Beginning in 1265, anyone entering a contract worth 20 Bolognese lire or more was required to go to the Memoriali office where a notary, appointed by the commune, made a second, authenticated version of the act. Among the more than one and a half million registrations the office produced between 1265 and 1436, scholars also found poetry, mostly love poetry of the Italian courtly tradition, sketches and elaborate images, liturgical texts, and prayers entered by notaries amidst and at times visually indistinguishable from the Latin clauses of contracts. Previous scholarship has focused on either the poetry or the contracts in the Memoriali registers; I examine whatever the notary put on the page, asking how these different genres may have mutually shaped notaries’ perceptions of gender. I show that viewed through the lens of poetry, in which a lover desires a lady-lord whom he never really possesses, categories of people in the contracts can be interpreted to be occupied with either a woman, a man, or a nonbinary person. Rather than fixating gender categories, the Latin formulae encoding parties’ wills can be seen as means to contain conflicting desires within non-violent boundaries. Indeed, numerous agreements in the Memoriali were acts in which parties promise to refrain from further escalation or outright violent retaliation in a conflict. The poetry, images, prayers, and liturgical texts disappear from the pages of the Memoriali toward the middle of the fourteenth century alongside what previous scholars have identified as an increasing insistence of the law on binary gender. Overall, the paper demonstrates that combining evidence of different textual and visual genres provides us with a method of analyzing changes of seemingly static notions of gender in legal documents.