Scribes and notaries in Ancient Regime Galicia. An approach to their typologies and features

This article tries to offer a global view of the different kinds of scribes in Ancient Regime Galicia –such as royal escribes, permanent scribes, council officials, harbour escribes, rent scribes, and those which were born after the 18th-century Bourbon Reform– by defining their competences and features, on the basis of territorial case studies. Firstly, we will approach the legal corpus developed by the Castilian monarchs in order to control this medieval profession, which would reach its zenith during the Habsburg dynasty. Similar attention is put to the control mechanisms used to look after the right performance of this crucial office