Intus and foris. Cultures of Space, the Alpine Environment, and Territorial Relations in the Language of Communal Documents (Bormio, 14th-16th Centuries)

The paper examines the wide range of deictic and, more generally, spatial references that more markedly diverge from the standard of notarial and chancery Latin found in the documentation of the commune of Bormio, especially in the Council’s minutes. Documentary Latin is not immobile, and in the final two decades of the fifteenth century and the first two decades of the sixteenth the language written by all the town chancellors makes room for many forms of dialectal speech. This change, of course, can be explained by specific cultural, social and economic reasons. Even with the help of linguistic and ethnographic tools, which will allow us to focus on the relationship between «language and environment» (G.R. Cardona), the ultimate objective will be an analysis of spatial relations between the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Age, taking into account the political representation of territorial conflicts and the more general framework of an Alpine population’s experience of the mountain ecological variety and transformation.