“No firmó porque dijo no saber”: alfabetizados y analfabetos en documentos notariales de CODEA de los siglos XVI y XVII.

Abstract

During the 16th and 17th centuries, many notarial documents in Spain, signally those of a private nature, as contracts, began to include the signature (or a note on the incapacity to sign) of the parts. This change occurred in the context of increased literacy rates and of a reform of the notarial activities. In this paper, we investigate 1000 documents of these centuries contained in the linguistic corpus CODEA. Through a distinction between probatory, dispositive and petitionary documents, and between documents written by professionals (notaries) and non-professionals, the paper reflects on the possibilities of research offered by the data contained in these documents.