Communiquer depuis la prison. Lettres de prisonniers et captifs de l'Archivio Datini (Toscane, vers 1400)
Abstract
86 letters written on behalf of some thirty prisoners have been found so far in the Datini archive, the main series of private letters from the late Middle Ages. The conditions of detention vary from individuals captured at sea by the Moors or in the countryside by soldiers to inmates of urban prisons, usually locked up for debts. They are not close relatives of the merchant Francesco Datini, but in general acquaintances related to him or his collaborators by ties of distant kinship, friendship or the practice of business, as well as characters on the periphery of his network, who nevertheless contact him to ask for food, a loan, a gift or an intervention. These letters thus illustrate a little-known but obviously common practice of the petition addressed not to institutions or princes but to ordinary citizens, motivated above all by charity. Apart from the precious nature of these direct testimonies on the conditions of detention and contacts with the outside, these letters strike with their strong material and stylistic diversity, which also suggest that varied options were adopted in order to communicate, between the prisonners and the surrounding society.