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Journal Article
Signatures and Signatories
2022
Overview
This article identifies 627 signatures by at least 361 lay non-scribes, presumably overwhelmingly gentry, in 179 documents from the reign of Ivan IV. These data provide new information on literacy and documentation in sixteenth-century Muscovy. Signatures appeared in a variety of forms, often in short sentences. Not just witnesses but primaries, executors and others signed documents. Literate men signed some documents but not others. Although we do not know what motives determined whether a participant in the transaction signed it, signing was a socially acceptable and normal procedure. Failure to sign did not signify illiteracy. The ambiguities of the evidence of signatures reflect the transitional status of writing in Muscovite culture as written documentation gradually replaced oral transmission.
Publisher
Franz Steiner Verlag
Subject
