Archives And Documents 55
and Sardinia’s gradual but undeniable opening up towards the general Italian
and Mediterranean context.9
Italian historiography—particularly in the last 15 years—has witnessed an
important methodological and historical rethinking of sources—especially in
terms of the relationship between the source, the institution or subject that
produced them, the territory in which that institution or that subject operated,
the archival institution that preserves them, and scholarly labor.10
However, what has prevailed in Sardinia, perhaps because the discovery of
new sources has monopolized the interest of scholars, is the study and publica-
tion of sources11—often solely in summary—rather than methodological and
critical reflection on that which many today define as “the geography of the
sources or the structure of the sources.” To this perspective must also be added
the set of problems related to the manuscript tradition and archives, since the
history of the archives and of the documentation of the actual contents of the
archive are inextricably bound to the history of sources, which they clarify and
endow with greater historical depth.
To this end, a radical rethinking of the historiography of southern Italy has
“freed itself ” from the categories of medieval studies on northern Italy. This
also applies to the study of sources; I am here thinking, for example, of the
legal sources that for a long time related to the cities of the south—as Mario
Del Treppo12 as well as Peter Corrao point out in a lucid analysis of late me-
dieval Sicily13—that were constantly related to and contrasted with another
9 Cecilia Tasca, “I documenti giudicali negli archivi italiani e stranieri: ‘dispersione’ archi-
vistica e ‘recupero’ della memoria,” in Settecento-Millecento, pp. 83–122, offers a precise
account of documents pertaining to Sardinia (eleventh–thirteenth centuries) preserved
in the state and ecclesiastical archives of the Italian peninsula and elsewhere.
10 For basic information on the geography and various types of written sources related to
the Italian Peninsula, see Paolo Cammarosano, Italia medievale. Struttura e geografia delle
fonti scritte (Rome, 1991); Armando Petrucci, Medioevo da leggere. Guida allo studio delle
testimonianze scritte del Medioevo italiano (Turin, 1992).
11 For a detailed review of the historiography, see Olivetta Schena, “Le fonti per la storia del
regno di Sardegna negli studi di paleografia e diplomatica sardo-catalana,” in Sardegna
Catalana, eds Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena (Barcelona, 2014), pp. 11–22.
12 Mario del Treppo, La libertà della memoria. Scritti di storiografia (Rome, 2006), pp. 111–112.
13 Pietro Corrao, “Città e normativa cittadina nell’Italia meridionale e in Sicilia nel medioe-
vo: un problema storiografico da riformulare,” in La libertà di decidere, realtà e parvenze di
autonomia nella normativa locale del medioevo, Atti del Convegno nazionale di studi (Cento,
6–7 May 1993), ed. Rolando Dondarini (Cento, 1995), pp. 35–60.