This article asks a simple question that nevertheless has broad implications for historians of premodern continental Europe: What did notaries do? It answers it by applying descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and clustering techniques to the typological distribution of all deeds preserved in the notarial collections of six French and Italian cities—Paris, Toulouse, Mende, Turin, Florence, and Livorno—for the year 1751, as well as smaller datasets for other dates and locations. The results of this analysis are surprising. In spite of a high degree of consistency in the notarial profession and terminology (a trait that facilitates our comparisons), the notarial style of each city varied greatly. Variations within a single state were sometimes greater than those across state borders. Both supply and demand of notarial services differed from city to city. Overall, our conclusions are as important as the methodology that we adopt to reach them. Our aim is to offer a replicable analysis that puts quantitative methods in the service not only of the study of a source (notarial records) that is widespread across late medieval and early modern continental Europe and its overseas empires but also of a renewed comparative social history that does not shy away from the heterogeneity of primary sources.

本文提出了一个对前现代欧洲大陆历史学家具有广泛意义的简单问题：公证员做了什么？它通过将描述性统计、主成分分析和聚类技术应用于今年法国和意大利六个城市（巴黎、图卢兹、门德、都灵、佛罗伦萨和里窝那）的公证收藏中保存的所有契约的类型分布来回答这个问题1751，以及其他日期和位置的较小数据集。这一分析的结果令人惊讶。尽管公证专业和术语高度一致（便于我们比较的特点），但每个城市的公证风格差异很大。单个州内的变化有时大于跨州边界的变化。公证服务的供需因城市而异。总的来说，我们的结论与我们为达到这些结论所采用的方法同样重要。我们的目标是提供一种可复制的分析，将定量方法不仅用于研究广泛存在于中世纪晚期和现代早期欧洲大陆及其海外帝国的来源（公证记录），而且还用于更新的比较社会历史这并不回避主要来源的异质性。