«Un disordine ha partorito un ordine». Sixteenth- and Eighteenth-Century Bolognese Cartulari and Ecclesiastical Legislation on Archives

Abstract

At the State Archive of Bologna, in the collection Corporazioni religiose soppresse, are today preserved the archives of the city convents and monasteries dated to the first centuries of the Middle Ages and suppressed during the French rule. Inside them are preserved, beyond unraveled documents of many types, also a series of access instruments (strumenti di corredo archivistico) confectioned between the 17th and the 18th centuries, included also the Sommari and the Repertori delle scritture. These texts report, in a concise form, all the documentation of the Archive, to which they belonged before the suppression of the institution itself. They will be analyzed from a chiefly Diplomatic point of view, in order to identify their originating documentary belonging and to define their value and their function, through the comparison between the formal and substantive datum and the referential archival legislation.