Wills from Late Mediaeval Venetian Crete 1312-1420 (review)

Abstract

Reviews 275 discussions of the religious machinery of court, it includes a lengthy appendix stored in electronic format on a computer diskette which is attached to the back cover. This appendix (of which there are two copies on the diskette) provides a detailed calendar of all the information k n o w n about sermons at court between 1558 and 1625, including references to sermons in manuscript sources, the names of those appointed to deliver Lenten sermons, printed texts of sermons and other material. Both files can be read on computers using either Windows or Macintosh operating systems. This is a wonderful resource and will be of great assistance to any scholar w h o wishes to explore the religious, ecclesiastical and political history of this period. Quite h o w long the diskette will remain attached to copies of the book which are held in libraries is another matter. It can only be hoped that the information contained in the appendix, along with the contents of the book itself, will gain sufficiently wide currency to encourage a richer understanding of religion and the court in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Paul E. J. Hammer School of Classics, History and Religion University ofNew England McKee, Sally, ed., Wills from Late Mediaeval Venetian Crete 1312 Washington, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 1998; cloth, 3 vols; pp. xx, 478,515,303; R.R.P. $US 65.00. This is the first in a new series of publications sponsored by Dumbarton Oaks and the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia. T w o other collections of material from Cretan notaries are being prepared for publication in this series by 276 Reviews Alan M . Stahl (Angelo de Cartura and Donato Fontanella) and by Charalambos Gasparis (Francesco Croce). The project was initiated with the support of the former Director of Dumbarton Oaks, Angeliki Laiou, and the late Nikolaos Panagiotakes at the time when he was Director of the Istituto Ellenico. It is to be hoped that their successors will continue to promote the publication of documents of this kind. These three volumes, containing over twelve hundred pages and published at a price which puts them within the reach of individual scholars, make an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of many aspects of life in Venetian Crete. Seven hundred and ninety wills are printed in the first two volumes, four hundred and thirty-one of them made by women. They reveal a richly multicultural society composed of Greeks, a small Jewish minority, and a number of 'Latins'. Most of the latter were presumably of Venetian origin, although certainty is not possible, and a 'Latin' name m a y in some cases conceal a person of Greek or mixed origin. A useful addition to the third volume, which contains a l i s t of the testators and an index of the persons mentioned in the wills, would have been a list of the notaries together with the numbers of the buste in which their acts are located in the collection Notai di Candia in the Archivio di Stato in Venice. This information is scattered through the earlier volumes. The list of tesjators which appears in this volume would have been more useful if the names had been arranged in alphabetical order rather than orders of wills (a chronological list would also have been of interest to some researchers). A random check of the names in ten wills showed all names correctly entered, except that Nicolota, Minoti and Madalena, the legitimate daughters of Francesco Gozo (Will 21) seemed to have disappeared (although his natural daughter Agnete is there). Reviews 277 The wills are nearly all written in Latin, although a few, after a preamble in Latin, are written in the Venetian dialect. There are no Greek wills. From the fifteenth century onwards some Cretan wills written in Greek survive, so w e m a y suspect that in the early stages of Venetian domination in Crete, Greek was not recognised as a language in which wills could be m a d e or at any rate registered. The Latin of the documents shows occasional infiltrations into Latin of Greek vocabulary (either from Cretan sources, or because...