Sarina Kuersteiner

Research interests

My research centers on how economic and legal history intersect with cultural history in the medieval Mediterranean. I currently focus on two principal areas of study.

One area examines implications of cross-cultural exchange between traders of the medieval Mediterranean for our understanding of European economic history. I am fascinated by questions of how people from different geographic regions and adhering to different religions do business with each other. In my article “Whatever God Gives: Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Rizq and Latin Resicum in Commercial Vocabulary, 1154-1164 CE” (forthcoming, Speculum), I show that the word rizq (Arabic for divine sustenance, provision, and livelihood) was used in similar contexts by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traders. Tracing one word across Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, and Latin documents, I argue that economic integration extended beyond the movement of goods to legal institutions. The article lays the foundation for what will become my second book project.

The other area of research focuses on the question of who the writers of commercial contracts were. In the northwestern Mediterranean cities, notarial registers, the books in which we find Latin contracts, are the unique products of notaries, who enacted the legal framework in which economic activity occurred. When sifting through the parchment and paper pages of notarial registers in Italian state archives, one quickly notes that notaries did a great deal more than write down with some extra legalese the various matters that people paid them to record. Some of them wrote love poems in the guise of the Latin legal texts that filled their registers. 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. Minds and Margins: Notarial Culture in Bologna, ca. 1250-1350 is my current book project (based on my PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2021) and the first study to combine legal-institutional and cultural approaches in an analysis of medieval notaries and their writings. Drawing on largely unpublished acts preserved in the State Archive of Bologna, the book examines marginalia in notarial records as windows into how notaries envisioned their roles and the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.