Literacy and memory in South Italy cities (15th-16th cent.)

The paper studies the handwritten and printed statute books of the South Italy cities as a sign of urban elites awareness of their own identity, particulary the collections called Privilegi, capitoli, lettere e grazie. These works were produced by local governments or by private scholars from the 15th until the 17th century and contained different acts delivered by a public authority (King, feudal lord) or by the local government. According to the documentary system of the Kingdom, these books, some of which had precious illuminations, had absolutely no legal value and could not be presented as proof to a court, which demanded the originals. The aims of their editors were more cultural than legal: they needed tools for remembering and retrieving every record of the city archive, and, what is more, for keeping the largest quantity of documents about the city, no matter what they were about. The institution of a city archive was influenced by the same affective attraction towards the recent medieval past. Such an attitude on the part of statute editors, city chancellors and archivists is not different from that of the antiquarians, historians, and lawyers who, during the same decades, were writing histories and eulogies of a family or of a city, just when the cities had lost every possibility of extending their political and judicial autonomy vis à vis the monarchy