This session asks historians to reconsider how to approach pre-modern scribal and notarial documents in light of the agency their authors exerted vis-a-vis the construction of gender. Each of the four papers in this session explores women's presence and absence in these male-authored texts and questions what historians ought to make of what is revealed and obscured. In thirteenth-century Italy and fourteenth-century Catalonia, notaries held the power of publica fides: public faith, the obligation to encode social and political reality in official legal form. In the modern world a notary must be hunted down at UPS for a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime document signing. But the numerous notaries of medieval southern Europe, were central to daily life: transcribing court testimony, writing wills, recording contracts between employers and washerwomen, negotiating peace between life-long enemies, recording promises to repay creditors, and writing the innovative forms of poetry which medieval people would sing to their sweethearts and which would come to define the medieval literary tradition. In twelfth-century Egypt, Jewish scribes produced a range of legal documents for their clients, including for slave owners who retained bills of sale and other court records that protected their ownership rights. Scribes in Jewish courts did not document the speech of enslaved people. However, contemporaneous personal letters and responsa do quote enslaved people’s speech, and these writings point to how the silence in scribal documents may be reinterpreted in this new light.

At the same time, previous scholars have noted the constructed nature of the legal document, the archive in which it is held, and the truth that these records claim to represent. These papers each grapple with how and why women are both present and absent and how gendered relationships are narrated in legal writing. The letter of legal documents purports, and in some ways strives, to reflect something of the lived experience of the people who sought their redaction. But the embodied practice of political life exceeded the legal page, spilling out not just into the margins but into what Dante called the truth with the face of a lie, fiction. That excess leaves its mark on the page both in absence and presence. For that reason, this session intentionally broadens the understanding of what counts as legal texts: legal acts certainly were, but scribes also used marginalia, drawings, and literary compositions to narrate the gendered constructs of medieval life. Like gender, genre is itself a constructed category for parsing the past, one whose medieval boundaries might not reflect our own.