Testament as a discursive genre in peninsular documentation (from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century)

Abstract

This article analizes the testamentary discourse evolution on the basis of the comparison of a hundred and fifty documents of different syntopies. These documents are also contrasted with the guidelines from the copyists’ handbooks of the studied periods. This work’s results cast new light on the chronological and geographic variation of this textual type as well as on the linguistic and discoursive uses which characterize it. Furthermore, these outcomes show the relevance of the copyist, as well as that of the enunciation conditions and the historical context in a genre which is commonly believed to be immobile.