Testamentos, codicilos y escrituras públicas. Evolución de las formas y contenidos de la última voluntad femenina en Galicia (siglos XII-XV)

Abstract

The study of the female last will through testaments from XII to XV centuries
allows the enlargement of a study that, in general usual historiography has reduced to funerary rituals, beliefs before death and succession of possessions. In this way, the study will move on delimiting rhythms and chronology in matters such as the substitution of scribes or religious witnesses for public notaries, language in which the document had been composed and change of dating. In relation to the testaments’ Salvationist content, what will try to be established is when the preferences on the burial site were originated and how did the dialectic eternal salvation – donations to the Church, was made operative. The result will allow to affirm that Galician women, noble or bourgeois, in front of the inevitable fact of death, manifest their religious attitudes and ritual options, cultural conventions, personal, friendship and family relationships, traditions and changing ways of behaviour, social practices framed in everyday life and many other topics whose final result takes us to a cultural construction typical of its kind in the Galician Low Middle Ages.