Pedro Kendúlfiz (†1051), Notary of the Royal Chancery of León: Training, Career, and Relationships

Resumen

As medievalists dealing with manuscript sources, two of the questions we try to answermost often are who were the material authors of the written testimonies we are usingfor our research and what was their cultural context. In order to solve these queries wetend to rely directly on each scribe’s texts to reconstruct their career and environment,but working with charters, and scribes for whom we have very few manuscript examples,the textual information that can be obtained is not always enough to go further. In thosecases where we only have a name, with or without patronymic, or even when the scribedid not sign the charter, we must depend only on the analysis of his writing since, throughthe graphic characteristics shown by the script, it is possible to ascribe him to a specificschool, and chronological and geographical context. Performing this detective approachis not easy. In this article, the methodology to be applied to unveil information aboutmedieval scribes will be tested, reviewing the current scholarship in order to shed lighton the professional career of one of the first notaries of the incipient royal chancellery ofthe Kingdom of Leon in the early eleventh century