The Oldest Notarial Documents of Vicenza District from the Collection of N.P. Likhachev, 1380S–1465S, with the Regestae of the Documents

Abstract

The collection of the Western European manuscripts gathered by N.P. Likhachev (1862–1936) and currently stored in the Scientific and Historical archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences contains, among other documents, the vast majority of this array comes from Italy (about five thousand documents), of which about a third are original notarial deeds. There are over ten thousand storage units related to the history of Italy in the collection of the West-European section of the archive of St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The collection is divided into fonds, and the focus of this research will be on the sixth collection that was named «Venice and its possessions», where you can find notarial deeds analyzed by a team of scholars within the framework of our project. The manuscripts studied by our team provide information about economic and social aspects of life in the rural communes of the Val d’Astico located in the Northern Vicentino. Here we describe the geographical and historical peculiarities of the region in order to place the documents in the particular context and to proceed with its better understanding. All of these documents are instrumenta rather than imbreviaturae, and at least when it comes to the deeds drawn by Pietro di Zennaro we can treat this set as a certain unity. Within this study, one of our main objectives of the team work was preparation of these documents for critical publication. The source material studied here still has to be contextualized and researched in more profound manner; however, we can clearly see now that the investigation of the deeds stored in the Western European section of the Scientific and Historical archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences is more than promising.