At 06:26 PM 21/02/2007 +0100, you wrote:
Dear Luciana,
I'm not sure, I understood you right, but it looks to me that the CEI isn't talking about "record" but about "instrument": our main focus is not the totality of records in the archive - even if they have legal value - but those formal documents the traditional scholars of diplomatics are interested in, and that seems best described as "instrument" (or "deed"?). As we're principally historians of premodern (and I would assume even medieval) times, when all the records preparing the legal act often not survived, we focussed on the final result, the "instrument"/"deed" - and that would be the proper english term to use.
Did I get it right?
Yes, you got it right. Every instrument is a record but not every record is an instrument; only the records that relate to an act either ad substantiam or ad probationem are instruments, the legal records that is. A deed is only the first category of instrument, the kind that is the substance of the act. Do you want to further limit the CEI to deeds? Luciana