Crossing Temporal Boundaries. Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s Notetaking Practice and the Material Circulation of the Thinking on Law between the 16th and 18th Centuries

Abstract

In recent years more and more attention has been paid to the various implications of the so-called ‘material turn’ for legal history. While the ‘filing approach’ focused upon the role of ‘paperwork’ in the making of law, the legal historical methodology recently integrated the book history claim to look at the interconnection between form and content, considering legal books as material objects, especially dealing with the circulation of law and legal ideas. This article offers another approach to using materiality as a tool for doing legal history. It focuses on the interdependence between handwritten notebooks and legal thinking. In particular, I explore the notetaking and excerpting practices of one of the leading figures of the cultural, political and religious life of the first half of the Italian Settecento, Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), showing how this practice had an impact on the production of Italian 18th-century legal thinking.

Keywords: Materiality, Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Notetaking, Legal knowledge, 16th Century