In this book, Laurie Nussdorfer uses information from 1400 to 1700 concerning some notaries in Rome to contribute to the vast literature on writing and legal documents. Since this is a big subject, the author concentrates on a set of notaries, known as Capitoline because they worked alongside a court there, and their era of richest surviving sources, about 1550 to 1650. In fact, much of the book concerns a sample of these thirty notaries active in the year 1630. As the focus sharpens, the economic and social context becomes more opaque.

An introduction briefly surveys the familiar story of notarial cultures in Italy, noting the varieties of experiments in places like Florence, Venice, and Rome, but not looking at nearby Bologna or the wider vistas in France and Spain. Six chapters situate notaries in the contexts of the law, their professional activities, their rules or statutes, their endless searches for repositories or archives, activities in notaries’ offices, and finally the role the state played in policing notarial practices. These topics represent choices to privilege some aspects of notarial culture over others. Putting the law first places notaries in their typical venue of poor cousins to the proper lawyers. Notaries were in the business of creating legal documents and contracts that were in theory accurate and impervious to subsequent legal challenge. Yet as servants of the law, the notaries had to know some law. These particular Capitoline notaries, after 1586 possessors of venal offices that were for them an investment and for the papal state a revenue stream, had a lucrative monopoly of access to an important court and its many revenue-generating activities.

The second chapter on the profession could be clearer on just how these Capitoline notaries fit into the broader picture of the many other notaries active in Rome. The city was a complex jurisdiction, ruled by the pope as a state with international income and obligations, all causing benefits and problems to the people living under its authority in the papal state in central Italy. This government, like others in the sixteenth century, found itself so desperate for funds that selling offices, of which notaries were only one type, secured immediate revenues at other costs. Nussdorfer might have helped the reader by providing more information about the many private notaries working outside the fiscal and guild system and what part they played in the several processes for supplying this unique jurisdiction with business and legal records. Also, Rome's economy was unusual and its public debt also appeared in the sixteenth century, so more analysis of the peculiarities of the local economy would help place this profession in its proper context. Money and people flowed into Rome from every corner of Europe, and the papacy recycled much of this wealth, and squeezed its subjects hard, to play a political and spiritual role on this broad canvas.

The third chapter concerns the profession and its rules, which survive in more detail for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The papacy derived an income of 500 scudi per office from the thirty notaries, but the place this income played in the overall tax structure is not discussed. Were there taxes in Rome on paper, or registered contracts, or other fiscal expedients that placed notarial work in the fiscal system? The next chapter is about archives, and while this is an important aspect of the history of writing, economic historians also view archives as places where notaries and indeed the state could make money by charging fees for clients storing and occasionally even seeing their documents or having them copied.

Chapter 5 concerns the work places of notaries, as well as their fees and economic status. It would be helpful to the reader to have some general sense of the purchasing power of the scudo in order to understand the meaning of the fixed and sliding scale fees the notaries charged for redacting contracts, wills, and other legal instruments. Nussdorfer describes the notaries as active in the local credit markets and before 1612 it seems they were able to collect fees for being brokers between lenders and debtors. After that date, the state tried to change the rules but it was in practice hard to enforce limits on the ways notaries used information to further their own interests as well as their clients. Being a broker was a separate profession, and though the word appears first in the title, it does not loom large in this analysis of notaries. Questions about agency, transparency, and information searches should be central to understanding how notaries affected transaction costs in Rome and elsewhere.

Nussdorfer concludes with some thoughts on the main theme about how the written word acquires legal force and how notaries exercised their power over the word. This book relies on the power of words alone and does not contain a single table, chart, map, graph, or illustration to illuminate its themes. In this period, potential notarial customers increasingly relied on their own writing skills, or business letters, or private company records to make contracts and money, or fail in these endeavors. Studying the immense paper trail notaries have left behind is just part of the story, and may require teams of scholars and sophisticated sampling techniques to determine for written words the demand as well as the supply.