This excellent volume represents the collaborative efforts of several Italian historical societies that culminated in a series of seminars and a conference in Florence in 2018. The essays focus on Tuscan notaries, whose abundant surviving acts constitute a unique documentary source for original research. The aim is both to call for future research and to shed light on many aspects of Tuscan society that have thus far escaped close scholarly scrutiny. Collectively, the essays use the notarial records to examine key issues relating to territorial space, topography, orthography, relations between public and private authorities, the interplay between secular and ecclesiastical spaces, and, as the title suggests, the mobility of the notaries themselves, who often traveled long distances, crossing, in the process, social, economic, and cultural boundaries. As Giuliano Pinto succinctly states in his essay on Trecento Pescia: notarial acts deepen our knowledge of society, particularly where other public sources are not available.

In many ways, the book is a sequel to the pioneering work on notaries done in the 1980s and 1990s by Franek Sznura and other scholars. The collection consists of sixteen essays, ranging temporally from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, with emphasis on the former. They deal with Siena, Prato, Arezzo, Pescia, Pistoia, and most of all Florence, which stands at the core of the work. The notarial acts for thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Florence are particularly valuable because relatively few archival sources survive there for the period.

The finely wrought essays mirror the notarial records themselves in their detailed and interdisciplinary nature. It is indeed difficult to overstate the range and quality of information the essays relay. Scholars examine social, economic, and institutional boundaries across the Florentine state and beyond it (Pinto, Pirillo, Tognetti, Tanzini, Becattini, Bettarini, Malavolti, Gualtieri, Scharf). They deal with topographical and spatial issues, with the careers of individual notaries, and with stylistic, orthographical issues, juxtaposing notarial acts with other contemporary writings and traditions (Faini, Ceccherini, De Robertis). There is valuable information about the relationship between the religious and secular spheres; about the activities of Cistercians, who helped keep Florence's communal accounts (Ghignoli); and the notaries of Orsanmichele (Vestri) and of the cathedral (Fabbri). There are equally excellent insights into the activities of notaries in Pescia (Pinto), Pistoia (Gualtieri), Arezzo (Scharf), and Siena (Allingri). The last is a quantitative study that accounts for the decline to the recourse to notaries in Siena by the middle of the fourteenth century. The essay works well together with Sergio Tognetti's revision of Federigo Melis's assertion that notaries largely disappeared in Florence at this time as the result of private account books kept by merchants themselves. Additionally, the essays offer new information about the power dynamics in various parts of the Florentine countryside, about which much has been written, but from a different perspective. The collection ends with a fascinating description of ongoing work for databases of notaries (Casucci).

The themes of the essays are too numerous and diverse to cover adequately in a short review. Inasmuch as the notaries were both private and public figures, their vantage points were multivalent. Their acts uncover information that both illuminates and problematizes the current scholarly status quo. Paolo Pirillo's study, for example, reveals the economic interdependence between city and rural lands, ecclesiastical and lay territory, and uses the notarial acts to reconstruct little-known rural settlements. The overlapping of ecclesiastical and secular boundaries is particularly evident in Lorenzo Tanzini's insightful study of the bishopric of Fiesole. Meanwhile, power dynamics in the countryside receive careful, nuanced consideration in the essays of Gian Paolo Scharf, Piero Gualtieri, Francesco Bettarini, and Ilaria Becattini. Enrico Faini's excellent essay measures the work of early notaries against the chronicles of the period, to achieve a greater understanding of both. Matthieu Allingri argues that despite the apparent marginalization of notaries in Siena, there was a redefinition of their function, with greater service to apolitical institutions and engagement in speculative commercial activities. Giuliano Pinto uses notarial records for fourteenth-century Pescia that allow him to re-create a vibrant town of small shops, with diverse economic activities and an articulated social structure.

There is still more in this collection, whose greatest strength is perhaps its steadfast ability to cross disciplinary boundaries. The volume provides much important new information and serves as a clarion call for the use of notarial records to allow scholars to go beyond traditional narratives.