Power Beyond the Rules. Formalism and Experimentation in the Italian Chanceries (1380-1500 ca.)

Recent attention to late medieval chancelleries is the result of a growing interest in medieval public records as not only vectors of data, but as performative actions and discursive fields. In Italy, these themes became popular a few decades ago with respect to the “written revolution” and the strong and substantial relation between government and writing in the communal age. In more recent years, chancelleries and public written records in late medieval and early modern Italy have also attracted scholarly attention, as research started to focus on political and documentary contexts very different from the communal age and closely connected to the development of larger territorial polities and their innovative ways of legitimizing public authority. During the fifteenth century and almost everywhere in Italy the central chancellery – that is the most important centre of production of public written records – became the heart of public authority, power and legitimacy, increasingly monopolising the decision making process. Within such a general context, my paper will focus on the dynamics between norms and rules, and emerging or surviving exceptions, variations and singularities during the long century that goes from the last decades of the fourteenth to the first years of the sixteenth century. A single case study, that is fifteenth century Milan, will be at the hearth of the analysis, but more examples will be added from other principalities and republics. Rules, norms and patterns were implemented over the century in order to answer to the material need of recording data and classifying records, and to the increasingly crucial purpose of selecting and controlling the men working on relevant and often secret matters. However, those rules and regulations often proved to be uneffective in responding to the everyday governamental needs and in reflecting and adapting to the different political languages in use. In order to understand such a contradiction, the dynamics between order and desorder, rules and exceptions should be interpreted in a non-conflictual way. The crucial role of the chancellery lied on the combination, rather than the concurrence, of flexibility and order. By developing the formality required in records and practices for autenticity, legimation and control, but still maintaining the informality necessary to experiment new documentary strategies and to absorb different languages, Italian chancelleries in the fifteenth century tried to answer both to the need of rules to express and confirm the power of the prince or the regime, and to the search for creativity to face the daily challenge of building this very power.