Publications by Ryan K Low
Alienation by Expertise: The Form and Function of Apothecary Inventories from Late Medieval Provence
History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, 2025
Chief among the corpus of extant functional pharmacopeias—lists of drugs of existing collections—... more Chief among the corpus of extant functional pharmacopeias—lists of drugs of existing collections—are apothecary inventories. These documents provide historians with valuable snapshots of living and regularly utilized collections of medicaments, instruments, and the paraphernalia necessary to run an apothecary shop. This article shows the deep, medieval roots of this tradition, and what it reveals about the highly regarded technical expertise of apothecaries. Apothecaries in medieval Provence composed such inventories themselves, seemingly without the intervention or supervision of a notary, customs officer, or any other public official. Notaries did not copy these inventories into their registers, as was typical for other lists of goods found in post-mortem inventories, guardianship inventories, and dowry contracts. Instead, notaries stitched apothecary inventories into the binding of their registers, without even attempting to copy them. This article argues that by the late fifteenth century, apothecaries had developed such highly specialized technical knowledge that the information contained within their inventories became unintelligible to others, including well-educated public officials. Only apothecaries possessed the arcane knowledge necessary to comprehend the contents of their craft. This observation sheds new light on apothecaries, their stocks, and the ability of the law to govern them.
Jewish Moneylenders and the Use of Notarial Registers in Late Medieval Provence
Aschkenas, 2025
Generations of excellent scholarship concerning the social and economic lives of Jewish communiti... more Generations of excellent scholarship concerning the social and economic lives of Jewish communities in late medieval Provence have relied upon notarial contracts to illustrate and analyze financial, seasonal, and demographic aspects of Jewish moneylending. Historians have paid less attention to how Jews influenced the practices of Christian notaries themselves. This article examines the practices of notaries favored by Jewish moneylenders. By focusing on nearly ten thousand contracts recorded in sixty registers composed by late fourteenth-century notaries in Apt, a market town and episcopal see in central Provence, this article argues that notaries created sophisticated information management devices to meet the distinctive needs of Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not simply passive users of notaries, but rather they were actors in the evolution of late medieval notarial practice and legal technologies.
The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, 2021
The DALME environment contains dozens of Jewish household inventories from Provence, Germany, Cat... more The DALME environment contains dozens of Jewish household inventories from Provence, Germany, Catalonia, and northern France. The inventories from Provence include many from Aix-en-Provence and several from Marseille. The collection also includes inventories from Regensburg and one inventory from Paris. Jewish inventories are extraordinarily rare. The ones collected here survive due to the records produced by tax seizures, criminal inquests, and notarial services.
Revue Mabillon, 2021
Pierre TOUBERT, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.
Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 2019
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Publications by Ryan K Low