This volume investigates the relationship between archives and information in the early modern world. It explores how the physical documentation that proliferated on an unprecedented scale between the 16th and 18th centuries was managed in the context of wider innovations in the sphere of communication and of significant upheaval and change. The chapters assess how archives were implicated in patterns of statecraft and scrutinise critical issues of secrecy and publicity, access and concealment. They analyse the interconnections between documentation and geographical distance, probing the part played by record-keeping in administration, governance, and justice, as well as its links with trade, commerce, education, evangelism, and piety. Alive to how the contents of archives were organised and filed, the contributors place paper technologies and physical repositories under the microscope. Extending beyond the framework of formal institutions to the family, household, and sect, this volume offers fresh insight into the possibilities and constraints of political participation and the nature of human agency. It deepens our understanding of the role of archives in the construction and preservation of knowledge and the exercise of power in its broadest sense. Above all, it calls for greater dialogue and creative collaboration to breach the lingering disciplinary divide between historians and archival scientists.
Author(s): Kate Peters; Liesbeth Corens; Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 326
City: Oxford
Foreword /Eric Ketelaar --
Introduction: Archives and information in the early modern world /Alexandra Walsham, Kate Peters, & Liesbeth Corens --
Part I: Organization and agency.
2.Early modern European archivality: organised records, information, and state power, c. 1500 /Randolph C. Head --
3.Archival intelligence: diplomatic correspondence, information overload, and information management in Italy, 1450-1650 /Filippo De Vivo --
4.Jean-Baptiste Colbert, accounting, and the genesis of the state archive in early modern France /Jacob Soll --
Part II: Access and secrecy.
5.The early modern secretary and the early modern archive /Arnold Hunt --
6.Knowledge, oblivion, and concealment in early modern Spain: the ambiguous agenda of the Archive of Simancas /Arndt Brendecke --
7.'Friction in the archives': access and the politics of record-keeping in revolutionary England /Kate Peters --
Part III: Media and materiality.
8.The material culture of record-keeping in early modern England /Heather Wolfe & Peter Stallybrass --
9.Archiving the archive: scribal and material culture in 17th-century Zurich /Sundar Henny --
Part IV: Documentation and distance.
10.Truth and suffering in the Quaker Archives /Brooke Sylvia Palmieri --
11.Death, distance, and bureaucracy: an archival story /Sylvia Sellers-García --
12.The transnational archive of the sinosphere: the early modern East Asian information order /Kiri Paramore --
Afterword /Ann Blair.
