Writing the Vernacular at the Merchant Court of Florence

This essay falls into two parts. Firstly, it examines the trend away from relying on Latin and toward using the vernacular at the mercantile courts during the late Middle Ages — a phenomenon that has been passed over in silence in almost all of the principal works on the history of the Italian language. In the second section it focuses on notaries who came to Florence from elsewhere to serve at the Mercanzia, the most important commercial tribunal in the city, where they were required to record document not in Latin, as they had been trained, but in the vernacular. As a result, the texts they produced present a particularly hybrid linguistic appearance (that is, a mix of Florentine and non-Florentine features). In so doing, therefore, these foreign notaries were gradually initiated into the lexical and phonological peculiarities of Florentine speech, turning them into important emissaries for the spread of Florentine literary and cultural, and not just legal, customs.