ARMARIUM

Study of the armorial register covers of Italian municipalities: the Albertini collection (Perugia, Fondazione Perugia)

From the mid-13th century onward, Italian communes began recording copies of their acts in bound registers, whose parchment covers bore the coat of arms of the official in charge, textual elements specifying the nature of the contained acts and indicating the names of the responsible notary and magistrate, as well as drawings and spontaneous annotations. 

The Armarium project, focused on the Albertini collection—an unprecedented corpus of over 1,700 register covers produced by the offices of the commune of Perugia between the late 13th and late 15th centuries—aims to provide the scholarly community with a database compiling images and information derived from the analysis of this still little-known documentation. 

This corpus is indeed an essential source for studying the practices of representation of individuals and social groups in the Middle Ages, reconstructing the recruitment networks and circulation of communal officers, and deepening our knowledge of the legal, literary, artistic, and heraldic culture of legal professionals.