Jewish Moneylenders and the Use of Notarial Registers in Late Medieval Provence

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.