Le memorie di Leopoldo II e il capitolo assente
The Memoirs of Leopold II and Discarded Chapter on the Judicial System Reform in the Duchy of Tuscany

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the network of private documents (so-called egodocuments) characteristic of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, a substantial part of which is in the Family Archives of the Tuscany Habsburgs in the National Archives in Prague. The network was a miscellany of diaries, journals, ‘travel journals’, notebooks, and folders with loose sheets containing notes, jottings, accounts, reflections, and testimonies of a personal and family nature as well as political and governmental issues. These documents formed an effective system of personal memory organisation that culminated with a long and varied text known as Il Governo di famiglia in Toscana (The Family Rule in Tuscany) which is Leopold’s autobiography of a kind. A brief reconstruction of the text’s complex preparation, as well as the events that followed the death of Leopold II, points out the confines of the publication written by Franz Pesendorfer several decades ago. The chapter about the judicial reform, missed out in the publication, gives a chance to verify some of Leopold’s ideas and intentions.

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