The paper discusses the evolution of private writing practice within taxation, town and Episcopal estates in 16th century Transylvania in a functional perspective. The development of estate economy, and especially that of allodial production, generated new organization patterns and institutional structures in economy. The good functioning of these was secured by estate servants mostly recruited from among literates, called in the documents litterati, deákok or Schreiber, with a wide range of scribal activities. The resulting transcripts – conscriptions, registers and inventories – meant a new type of documents slowly replacing oral communication with written one in the relationship of lords and their servants. The scribes practiced a cursive type writing, focussing primarily on fastness, and wrote simplified texts, freed from formulaic chancery language. The scribes used Latin in the documents they wrote, mixed with vernacular words, gradually turning to writing completely in vernacular languages, Hungarian and German, due to practicality and under the influence of the Reformation. [*]
[*] This work was supported by a Grant of the Ministry of National Education CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0579.
