Jewish Moneylenders and the Use of Notarial Registers in Late Medieval Provence
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Ryan K. Low
Abstract
Generations of excellent scholarship concerning the social and economic lives of Jewish communities in late medieval Provence have relied upon notarial contracts to illustrate and analyze financial, seasonal, and demographic aspects of Jewish moneylending. Historians have paid less attention to how Jews influenced the practices of Christian notaries themselves. This article examines the practices of notaries favored by Jewish moneylenders. By focusing on nearly ten thousand contracts recorded in sixty registers composed by late fourteenth-century notaries in Apt, a market town and episcopal see in central Provence, this article argues that notaries created sophisticated information management devices to meet the distinctive needs of Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not simply passive users of notaries, but rather they were actors in the evolution of late medieval notarial practice and legal technologies.
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction
- Die Briefbücher des Erfurter Rates bis 1456 als Quelle für Kredite von Juden
- Jewish Archives, Archival Practices, and Jewish-Christian Business Records in the Medieval Holy Roman Empire
- Mirror of the Community? Jews and Books of Obligations in Eger (Cheb)
- Jewish Life in Kolín in Light of Municipal Sources from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries
- The 1262 rotulo de puramento (TNA E 101/249/10)
- The Mother Tongues of Medieval English Jews
- Gender, Jewish Credit Markets, and Notarial Culture in the Crown of Aragon
- Jewish Moneylenders and the Use of Notarial Registers in Late Medieval Provence
- Legal Prohibitions on Usury and the Documents of the Cairo Geniza
- Weitere Beiträge
- Lehmann Isaac Kohen, Grandson of Behrend Lehmann and Student of Albrecht Haller: The (Rightful) First Jewish Medical Graduate of the University of Göttingen, 1739
- Die ›Judenoffnung‹ von 1743. Ein Quellenfund zur jüdischen Geschichte von Randegg
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction
- Die Briefbücher des Erfurter Rates bis 1456 als Quelle für Kredite von Juden
- Jewish Archives, Archival Practices, and Jewish-Christian Business Records in the Medieval Holy Roman Empire
- Mirror of the Community? Jews and Books of Obligations in Eger (Cheb)
- Jewish Life in Kolín in Light of Municipal Sources from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries
- The 1262 rotulo de puramento (TNA E 101/249/10)
- The Mother Tongues of Medieval English Jews
- Gender, Jewish Credit Markets, and Notarial Culture in the Crown of Aragon
- Jewish Moneylenders and the Use of Notarial Registers in Late Medieval Provence
- Legal Prohibitions on Usury and the Documents of the Cairo Geniza
- Weitere Beiträge
- Lehmann Isaac Kohen, Grandson of Behrend Lehmann and Student of Albrecht Haller: The (Rightful) First Jewish Medical Graduate of the University of Göttingen, 1739
- Die ›Judenoffnung‹ von 1743. Ein Quellenfund zur jüdischen Geschichte von Randegg
