1 Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy I, ed. Marco MOSTERT and Anna ADAMSKA, Utrecht Studies in Medieval History, 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). …………………………………………………………………….. The Use of Records in Medieval Towns: The Case of Bolzano, South Tyrol 1 HANNES OBERMAIR The innumerable documents and records preserved from the medieval town of Bolzano, providing us with a window into worlds of living that have long since passed, convey to us not only legal proceedings but many different social and cultural, political, economic, and gender- specific meanings. The records also have specific semantics which can be deciphered, and which stand in a strong relation to the social structure of the later Middle Ages. In order to shed some light on the forms of communication and their use in medieval Bolzano, this case- study will focus on four topics: • Which area and which city are we discussing? • How many records from Bolzano do exist? And what types of records are they? • The life-cycle of the records: how were the records written, used, and kept? • The Konrad Chrille fresco as a multimedia example of combining text and image, reading and seeing. 1 I would like to thank Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska for comments and suggestions on various versions of this paper.