Frammenti di giustizia dai territori estensi: libri di condanne 'perduti' dei secc. XIV-XV

The documentary fragments reused in archival bindings have great potentials for research because on the one hand they impose specific study methodologies, on the other they offer a very wide range of information, due to their nature of documents and to the context in which they are reused; studying them is useful for understanding both the phenomenon of the reuse of documents in a broad sense, and the dynamics of production, archiving and discarding of medieval documentation. The interconnections between documents and their context of reuse, in fact, are often part of a single historical process whose reconstruction necessarily starts from the evidence of reuse in bindings. The fragments of condemnation books from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, found in the archival collection ‘Frammenti’ of the Archivio di Stato di Modena and previously reused in the registers of the Archivio camerale estense, are now analyzed along with other similar fragments reused in bindings. They allow hypothesizing the reasons behind the very poor survival of judicial sources from the domains of the Este family and exploring their management and archiving process; in addition, this re-discovered documentation is crucial to amplify our knowledge about judicial practices in the Este domains during the late Middle Ages, until now based exclusively on the analysis of texts of statutory character and correspondence.