Sarina Kuersteiner

Research interests

My research is motivated by an interest in the intersection of law and culture in the medieval Mediterranean. I have always been inspired by a seemingly simple question: How do people interact with law? In my first book-in-progress, “The Culture of Notaries in Medieval Bologna” (based on my PhD dissertation at Columbia University, 2021), I study this question not from the perspective of legislators, jurists, and theologians, but from that of notaries who were not experts in jurisprudence. Unlike today, medieval notaries in the northwestern Mediterranean penetrated all echelons of society. They wrote contracts, court records, and last wills. They negotiated peace between life-long enemies, authenticated miracles, and recorded acts from which we learn about the employments of concubines. Reading notarial registers in the State Archive of Bologna (Italy), I found that several notaries did a great deal more than write up with some extra legalese the various matters that people paid them to record. Some of them wrote love poems in the guise of legal texts. Others entered liturgical texts or drew images in ways that blur the boundaries between legal and cultural genres and between center and margin. Marginalia in Bolognese acts thus urge us not to equate medieval legal texts with their modern equivalents. Drawing on largely unpublished acts preserved in the State Archive of Bologna, the book examines marginalia in notarial records as windows into how notaries envisioned their roles and the acts they wrote.

My next book project takes risk as an analytical frame to study legal and economic institutions in cross-cultural encounters in the medieval Mediterranean. While reading hundreds of Latin contracts, I noticed that sometimes notaries used non-Latin words, which are absent from contemporary Latin law books. A good example of this is the word resicum, misleadingly translated to English “risk”. This is a word normally found in its Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic forms in letters and documents written by Jewish and Muslim scribes. A first article pertaining to this research, “Whatever God Gives: Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Rizq and Latin Resicum in Commercial Vocabulary, 1154-1164 CE,” is forthcoming in Speculum. Risk fascinates me as an analytical concept because it allows us to see how medieval traders, notaries, jurists, and scribes talk to each other. Risk divides and connects people as it is an integral part of both loss and profit from trade. But risk also involves assumptions about divine providence and how to access it in this world. Hence, looking at how people connected risk to the sacred can explain divergences in institutional development.

I am currently a fellow in the Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors in Early Medieval Legal History and have been awarded a Laura Bassi Scholarship from Editing Press providing editorial support to junior academics.