Merchants and Notaries: Stylistic Movements in Italian Cursive Scripts

On the basis of a systematic study of the documentary scripts of both notarial and mercantile contexts, this essay delineates the characteristics of the Florentine cursive tradition from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. Scripts produced in the two different professional contexts (those of the notaries in Latin and those of the merchants in vernacular) present numerous deep and continuous affinities, which suggest a substantially unitary scribal tradition, at least through the first quarter of the fourteenth century. This common reality, however, is not homogeneous, and is articulated in a series of different interpretations, whose principal types are described diachronically and synchronically, distinguishing three different aspects of graphical analysis: rapidity, interlinear strokes, bodies of letters. Thus the most significant styles attested in the two professional contexts are discussed (still on the level of graphical characteristics) and the means of diffusion of cancelleresca and mercantesca as autonomous and distinctive scripts of notaries and merchants respectively, are presented. According to the proposed interpretation, these scripts emerged from the writing practices of the last years of the thirteenth century, but became the exclusive territory of the two professional circles only later, after a slow process of selection: the notaries chose the cancelleresca during the course of the first quarter of the fourteenth century, while the stylistic choices of the mercantesca became exclusive to merchants’ repertoire in the second quarter of the century