The Use of Records in Medieval Towns: The Case of Bolzano, South Tyrol

The innumerable documents and records preserved from the medieval town of Bozen-Bolzano, providing us with a window into worlds of living that have long since passed, convey to us not only legal proceedings but many different social and cultural, political, economic, and gender-specific meanings. The records also have specific semantics which can be deciphered, and which stand in a strong relation to the social structure of the later Middle Ages. Medieval Bolzano presents us with a historical example of European biculturalism or multiculturalism. It is striking for the diversity of the ‘cultural exchange’ between German and Romanic practices. The consequences and manifestations of this multiculturalism have to do with the location of the territory at the border of the medieval Romance and Germanic worlds. The consequences are visible not only in the typology of the preserved documents, with both notarial instruments and sealed documents being present, but also in language and law. Latin and the German vernacular lived precariously next to one another. Common law and Roman law coexisted. The medieval centre of Europe was a mixed zone, a zone of cultural accommodation, adaptation, and hybridity, whose cultural expressions resulted in blending, ‘blurredness’, and ‘creolisation’. This phenomenon can be studied by a wide range of disciplines, such as the history of settlements, of agricultural practice, or of art. Why then look at the urban literacy? Because here we can find clear traces of this knowledge transfer, which was so important for the making and shaping of Europe and its cultural design. The use of records in medieval Bolzano, with the toing and froing of cultural flows, can provide us with insight in ‘code switching’ in medieval spoken and written communication.