'No firmó porque dijo no saber': literate and illiterate speakers in notarial documents of the corpus CODEa of the 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES

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.

Keywords

• documentación notarial, edad moderna, corpus lingüísticos, analfabetismo y alfabetización, historia de la lengua