The Social History of The Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ARCHIVE:
RECORD-KEEPING IN EARLY MODERN

EUROPE*
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Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian. Along with private
studies and public libraries, they are the loci of our apprenticeship as scholars
and the warehouses from which we acquire the materials to build the history
we write. Until recently, however, scholars of the early modern period (as of
other eras) rarely paused to consider how and why these repositories came
into being, despite the fact that these processes have fundamentally shaped
and coloured our knowledge of the past. Too often we mine the documentary
sources they house without scrutinizing the decisions about selection, ar-
rangement, preservation and retention taken by those responsible for the
care of their contents over successive generations. We still fall into the trap
of approaching them as if they provide a transparent window through which
we can view societies remote from us in time.
The tendency to regard archives as neutral and unproblematic reservoirs of
historical fact is a legacy of the historiographical developments of the nine-
teenth century. It reflects the style of ‘scientific history’ synonymous with the
endeavours of the Prussian scholar Leopold von Ranke, who, by elevating the
empirical analysis of primary sources onto a pedestal, established the core
methodological principles of History as a discipline. The fetischization of the
archive of which we are heirs was a by-product of the pervasive positivism of
an era in which the ideal of objectivity emerged as the philosophical hallmark
of professional academic practice. It reflected the presupposition that the
conscientious scholar could reconstruct what really happened with precision
and accuracy.1
?
I thank Liesbeth Corens and Kate Peters for many stimulating conversations and for their
very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. This essay was completed
during the tenure of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, and I gratefully
acknowledge the Trust for its support.
1
See Lorraine Daston and Peter Gailson, Objectivity (New York, 2007); Georg G. Iggers,
‘The Professionalization of Historical Studies and the Guiding Assumptions of Modern
Historical Thought’, in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (eds.), A Companion to Western
Historical Thought (Oxford, 2006). On ‘the fetischism of facts’, see also the trenchant
comments of E. H. Carr in What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961), 16 and 7–30 passim.
Past and Present (2016), Supplement 11 ß The Past and Present Society
10 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 11
The same epistemological moment gave rise to the notion of the archivist
as a passive and impartial guardian of the surviving traces of the past. This
ethos of invisible custodianship underpinned the official repositories that
grew up as an arm of the modern bureaucratic state and gave birth to a
new class of civil servants. According to the pioneering Dutch handbook

on archival method published in 1898 and Hilary Jenkinson’s influential A
Manual of Archive Administration (1922), the archivist was simply the obedi-
ent and silent handmaiden of the historian. According to the dependent
relationship delineated in these texts, his responsibility was to preserve re-
cords rather than to encroach on the domain of the specially trained historical
researcher and participate in the task of interpreting them. For Jenkinson the
archivist who approached his work ‘without prejudice or afterthought’ there-
by became ‘the most selfless devotee of the Truth the modern world
produces’.2
These assumptions have exerted ongoing influence and contrived to ob-
scure the extent to which the ‘keepers’ of records themselves have played a
critical part in establishing the parameters and boundaries of historical
understanding. As Terry Cook has commented in an important article,
they have contributed to erecting an enduring and unhealthy divide between
historians and archivists and to effacing the ways in which the two operate as
‘co-creators’ of meaning. They have served for too long to occlude the sub-
jectivity of the archive itself.3
Arising from a conference held at the British Academy in April 2014, this
Past and Present Supplement builds on the burgeoning body of current work
that is approaching the archive not merely as the object but also the subject of
enquiry. Whereas once such questions were the terrain of a small band of
technical experts, they are now emphatically entering into the mainstream.
2
Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration (Oxford, 1922; 2nd edn 1937), 15–
16, 38–41, and esp. 123–5; Hilary Jenkinson, ‘The English Archivist: A New Profession’,
in Roger H. Ellis and Peter Walne (eds.), Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Stroud,
1980), quotation at 259.
3
Terry Cook, ‘The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists and the
Changing Archival Landscape’, American Archivist, lxxiv (2011); Francis X. Blouin and
William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the
Archives (Oxford, 2011) issues another call to bridge the divide between historians and
archivists; see also pp. 140–60 (‘The Archivist as Activist in the Production of (Historical
Understanding)’. See also Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Archives,
Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar
(Ann Arbor, 2006).
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ARCHIVE 11
Over the last two decades historians, anthropologists, literary critics and
archival scientists have begun to engage in stimulating cross-disciplinary
conversations. Shifting the priority from extracting the contents of archives
to interrogating their ethnography, a growing number of scholars are rec-
ognizing that, in the words of Kathryn Burns, they ‘are less like mirrors than

like chessboards’. They are not static arsenals of information, but sites in
which a variety of contemporary and later actors have exercised and nego-
tiated agency, identity and power.4 Simultaneously, close investigation of the
nature and genesis of the records that comprise these collections has gained
perceptible momentum.
In part, this reflexiveness is a logical corollary of the ‘linguistic turn’ that
has reoriented the humanities as a whole since the 1960s and ’70s. It follows
directly from postmodernism’s corrosive scepticism about the capacity of the
historian to penetrate the veil of language that divides us from the past and to
disentangle it as an ontological entity from the texts in which it is embedded.
It is a side-effect of the attention that, following Hayden White, scholars have
increasingly directed to ‘the content of the form’.5 It is also a consequence of
Michel Foucault’s classic interventions regarding the systems that structure
Western thought in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.
Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever — an idiosyncratic Freudian meditation on
the impulse to keep records as a process entailing the repression of alternative
stories and versions of the past —has been a further catalyst to critical en-
quiry. Treating the archive as a metaphor for the very matrices that contain
and frame the dominant discourses of our culture, these scholars have played
a key part in constituting it as a topic for investigation. They have fostered
awareness of how the archive (in a literal as well as a figurative sense) operates
as a distorting filter, lens and prism.6 In the words of Antoinette Burton, they
4
Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC,
2010), 124; and see Kathryn Burns, ‘Notaries, Truth and Consequences’, American
Historical Review, cx (2005), 357. For a stimulating overview of recent work, see
Elizabeth Yale, ‘The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline’, Book History,
xviii (2015).
5
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore, 1987).
6
See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(London, 1972) and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences (London, 2002); Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996); Carolyn Steedman, Dust
(Manchester, 2001); Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-
Railton (New Haven and London, 2013).
have provoked us to interrogate ‘one of the chief investigative foundations of

History as a discipline’.7
Proceeding from the conviction that archival cultures are historically spe-
cific and contingent, this collection explores the phenomenon of record-
keeping in the early modern period against the backdrop of the significant

religious, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as stim-
uli to it: the advent of mechanized printing, the expansion of literacy, the rise
of new conventions of self-expression and other related changes in the realm
of communication; urbanization, capitalism and the emergence of a market
economy; social mobility and migration; state formation, civil war and con-
stitutional revolution; the dual Protestant and Catholic Reformations and
confessionalization; and the Renaissance reconfiguration of attitudes towards
history, memory and time themselves. It focuses attention on the impulses
behind the surge in public and private documentation that marked the cen-
turies between 1500 and 1800 and places the processes by which individual,
collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorized and
used under the microscope. It delineates the defining features of early modern
archival culture and consciousness in order to provide a corrective and a
prophylactic:8 to highlight the dangers of projecting back onto that past
anachronistic models of the archive that are artefacts of the preoccupations
of the era in which it was institutionalized in its modern form.
Envisaged above all as a methodological intervention, this Supplement
brings together well-established and emerging scholars to experiment with
a range of approaches that together comprise what the leading Dutch archival
scientist Eric Ketelaar has called ‘the social history of the archive’.9 It moves
beyond the institutional and bureaucratic structures within which the study
of archival impulses has hitherto been largely confined and demonstrates how
deeply documentation became integrated into the daily routines of ordinary
people. It focuses attention not simply on the professional groups that arose
to service the paper church and state but also places a wider penumbra of
7
Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories’, in Antoinette Burton
(ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London,
2005), 6. For some other important contributions, see Eric Ketelaar, The Archival Image:
Critical Essays (Hilversum, 1997); Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds.), Refiguring the Archive
(New York, 2002).
8
Yale, ‘The History of Archives’, 333.
9
See Eric Ketelaar, ‘Prolegomena to a Social History of Dutch Archives’, in A. Blok, J.
Lucassen and H. Sanders (eds.), A Usable Collection: Essays in Honour of Jaap Kloosterman
on Collecting Social History (Amsterdam, 2014); Tom Nesmith, ‘Archives from the
Bottom Up: Social History and Archival Scholarship’, Archivaria, xiv (1982).
individuals whose lives were affected by the products of this culture under the
spotlight. The volume also situates the early modern record-keeping practices
it describes in the context of ‘the broader ecologies of writing, paperwork and
print’ that surround them .10 Cumulatively, the contributors underline both
the value and the necessity of returning to the archive at a time when major

projects for the digitization of printed books and manuscripts are increas-
ingly dematerializing them and reducing the repositories in which they reside
to virtual realities that can appear and disappear at the touch of a single
button on our computer screens. To echo Bill Sherman, they remind us of
the importance of ‘digging the dust’.11
The rest of this introduction performs three functions. First it presents a
series of working definitions that are themselves crucial tools for rethinking
existing approaches to record-keeping. Secondly, it sketches the historio-
graphical frameworks within which the essays in this collection must be
set, outlining the literatures from which they take their bearings and to
which in turn they contribute. Thirdly, it describes how the contributors
approach their task and discusses some of the key themes that emerge from
their research.
I
DEFINING RECORDS AND ARCHIVES
What are records and archives? Classical archival theory distinguishes be-
tween the two very precisely. Records are widely understood to be documents
made, received and maintained by institutions, organizations or individuals
as active evidence of legal obligations or business transactions; archives were
collections preserved permanently because of the enduring value of the in-
formation they contain. Records have immediate utility; archives are stored
for posterity and for the use of others than those who originally created them.
But the validity of these strict definitions (themselves the consequence of the
administrative revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centur-
ies) has been challenged in recent years by the complex dynamics of digital
records. It is equally problematic when applied to the early modern period,
when in practice the relationship between these two categories was complex
and fluid.12 Contemporaries deployed both these terms flexibly and they
10
Yale, ‘The History of Archives’, 355.
11
William H. Sherman, ‘Digging the Dust: Renaissance Archivology’, in Leonard Barkan,
Bradin Cormack and Sean Keilen (eds.), The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays in
Literature and Culture (Basingstoke, 2009).
12
See Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archives In and Archives Out: Early Modern Cities, as Creators of
Records and as Communities of Archives’, Archival Science, x (2010), esp. 203–4.
utilized the entities they describe in ways that defy the hard and fast boundar-
ies the earliest archival professionals erected between them.13
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people often used the word
‘archive’ to describe a place where ancient records, charters, deeds, evidences
and rolls, especially those belonging to a Crown or a kingdom were kept, a

physical institution or building such as a chancery or an exchequer.
Embedded in early modern dictionaries such as Thomas Blount’s
Glossographia published in 1661 and Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie of 1751, this definition reflected its Greek etymol-
ogy: its origins are in arkheion, a term denoting the residence of the superior
magistrates and governors of a city, territory, polity or state.14 ‘Record’ simi-
larly had a particular judicial and official resonance and ring: it referred to
writings deliberately preserved for legal purposes as precedents and forms of
proof, and to establish matters of fact.15 Yet both were also used in a more
expansive sense: they were deployed interchangeably with other types of de-
pository and document in which information, knowledge and memory were
stored, including libraries and museums and the collections of manuscripts,
books, maps and objects that comprised them.16
Enshrined in the separation of the Archives Nationales and the Bibliothèque
Nationale effected by the French Revolution and replicated in Britain in the
guise of the Public Record Office and the British Museum, the sharp distinc-
tion between an archive and a library — between places for keeping items
relevant to government and those relevant to scholarship and heritage —
13
Cf. Alexandrina Buchanan, ‘Strangely Unfamiliar: Ideas of the Archive from Outside the
Discipline’, in Jennie Hill (ed.), The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: A Reader
(London, 2011).
14
See the entries in Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, or a General
Dictionary (London, 1658); Thomas Blount, Glossographia: Or a Dictionary,
Interpreting All such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, Now Used in our Refined
English Tongue (London, 1661); and Thomas Blount, Nomo-lexikon, a Law Dictionary
Interpreting such Difficult and Obscure Words and Terms as are Found either in our
Common or Statute, Ancient or Modern Lawes (London, 1670); Elisha Coles, An English
Dictionary: Explaining the Difficult Terms that are Used in Divinity, Husbandry, Physick,
Philosophy, Law, Navigation, Mathematicks, and other Arts and Sciences (London, 1677) .
For Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751) and other French examples, see Eric
Ketelaar, ‘Muniments and Monuments: The Dawn of Archives as Cultural Patrimony’,
Archival Science, vii (2007), 352. On the etymology of archive, see OED, and Derrida,
Archive Fever, 1–2.
15
See OED, ‘record’.
16
For one example, see John Gregory, Gergorii Posthuma, or Certain Learned Tracts
(London, 1649), 249: ‘wee have exteant in the Archive of our Publicke Librarie . . . ’.
does not capture the organic and dynamic character of record-keeping be-
tween the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In early modern Europe, some
‘archives’ (especially those of elite families) contained material that was not
principally administrative or executive in quality and which was collected in
the interests of posterity. In turn ‘libraries’ frequently housed transcriptions

of legal instruments alongside private papers selected and obtained for the
purpose of preserving the past for analysis and study by contemporaries and
subsequent generations. In England, for instance, Robert Cotton’s personal
library was accessible to scholars and statesmen alike and included much
material that pertained to the state and indeed was purloined from it; it
also served as an arsenal of ammunition with which to challenge political
privileges, including the royal prerogative.17 The collections gathered by the
architect of the official archive of ancien regime France, Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
were equally eclectic and fed into both of the new institutions created by the
famous statute of 7 messidor an II (25 June 1794).18
Against this background, the claim that archival activity broadened out-
wards from political use around 1800 to include the protection and even
assertion of a nation’s cultural assets and patrimony can no longer be easily
sustained. Discernable a century before in the civic and domestic sphere, this
was part of a more prolonged historical transformation. Records and archives
functioned not merely as muniments, but also as monuments and memorials
that bore witness to the presence of historical consciousness and of an im-
pulse to preserve the past for the future.19 They must be situated on a lin-
guistic and conceptual spectrum with other kinds of repositories with which
they overlapped, including treasuries, shrines, museums and cabinets of
curiosities.
Anticipating the Derridean deployment of archive as a meta-term to de-
scribe the principal and encompassing cognitive and cultural systems that
17
On these overlaps, see Michael Riordan, ‘‘‘The King’s Library of Manuscripts’’: The State
Paper Office as Archive and Library’, Information and Culture, xlviii (2013). For Cotton’s
library and collecting activities, see Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History
and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1979), ch. 2.
18
See Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan, ‘Introduction’, in Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan
(eds.), ‘Toward a Cultural History of Archives’, special issue, Archival Science, vii, 4
(2007), 294. For Colbert, see Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste
Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, 2009). For the statute of 1794, see
J. M. Panitch, ‘Liberty, Equality, Posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the
French Revolution’, American Archivist, lix (1996); Ketelaar, ‘Muniments and
Monuments’, 352; see also Jennifer Milligan, ‘The Archive in Modern France: A
History’, in Burton (ed.), Archive Stories.
19
See Ketelaar, ‘Muniments and Monuments’.
shape human understanding itself,20 contemporaries also invoked ‘archive’ as

a synonym for the powerful abstractions that framed and structured their
lives. Among these was the imagined site and space which, as Frances Yates
and Mary Carruthers have shown, was how they conceived of memory
itself.21 In a 1603 English translation of Plutarch’s Morals, memory is called

the ‘unpleasant Archive or Register, and uncivile Record’ which men carry
about with them; in Juan de Santa Maria’s Christian Policie: or The Christian
Common-wealth (1632) it is declared to be ‘the Archive of the Sciences and
Treasury of Truth’, without which ‘to reade and studie, is (as they say), Coger
aqua en un harnero, to gather water in a si[e]ve’.22
Others found archive an apt analogy for the providence, wisdom and
judgement of God. It was a compelling metaphor for divine secrecy and
power. Nicholas Cross wrote of the ‘book of accounts kept in the archive of
Eternity, where the debts of all Men are enrolled’ and in a commentary on part
of the New Testament published in 1693 the Scottish divine Robert Leighton
said that it was ‘a happy thing’ for the Christian ‘to have in the soul an extract
of that great Archive and act of grace towards it, that hath stood in heaven
from eternity’. 23 William Austin, a lawyer at the Inns of Court, spoke of the
Mosaic books of the Bible as ‘the divine Archive’ in a poem about the Great
Plague of 1666.24 In The Reasonablenes of Scripture-Belief (1671), Charles
Wolseley employed it to describe the container in which the Deuteronomic
books were kept, the Ark: ‘the peculiar Archive God had, by his special com-
mand appointed for it’.25 By extension, it was also a term for the whole canon
of Scripture. The Oxford divine Edward Bernard, by contrast, invoked it to
refer to the deity’s most profound creation: ‘Adam, the origine of humanity,
the archive of reason and piety, the admirable and admiring possessour of the
recent and impolluted world’.26 Stretching its meaning in another direction, a
20
Derrida, Archive Fever.
21
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth, 1969), esp. ch. 6; Mary Carruthers, The
Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 2008), esp. ch. 1.
22
Plutarch, The Philosophie. Commonlie called The Morals, trans. Philemon Holland
(London, 1603), 140; Juan de Santa Maria, Christian Policie: or, the Christian
Commonwealth (London, 1632), 76.
23
Nicholas Cross, The Cynosure, or a Saving Star that Leads to Eternity (London, 1670),
177–8; Robert Leighton, A Practical Commentary, upon the Two First Chapters of the First
Epistle General of St Peter (York, 1693), 342.
24
William Austin, Epiloimia Epe, or, the Anatomy of the Pestilence A Poem in Three Parts
(London, 1666), 86.
25
Charles Wolseley, The Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief (London, 1672), 280.
26
Edward Bernard, Private Devotion and a Brief Explication of the Ten Commandments
(Oxford, 1689), sig. L2r.
mid seventeenth-century guide to rhetoric used it to describe the bosom of a

discreet and intimate friend: this too was ‘an Archive, fit to treasure up the
greatest secret, and in whose hands I can repose my life’.27 In a final example,
the learned Swiss physician Théophile Bonet deployed it in his guide to medi-
cine, surgery and diet as a striking metaphor for an essential organ of the

human body, describing the stomach as ‘the fountain of Digestion and
Archive of life’.28
Furthermore, ‘record’ and ‘archive’ were used by early modern writers as
both nouns and verbs. If they referred to concrete locations and tangible
objects, they also denoted the act of preserving and storing things and the
process of ensuring that noteworthy events, actions and persons were not
forgotten by transferring them into writing, image or print.29 The polyva-
lency of the phrase ‘record-keeping’ must be borne in mind: its meanings run
the gamut from making and creating records to watching, guarding, saving and
preserving them in a proper order and form. It is also telling that in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word ‘keep’ meant ‘to retain in the
memory’ and ‘to remember’.30 It referred to the manner in which informa-
tion and knowledge became secured in the human mind.
In accordance with contemporary use, this collection of essays adopts in-
clusive rather than narrow and restrictive definitions of ‘archive’ and ‘record’.
It takes the former to refer to a whole range of physical repositories and rooms
fixed in particular places as well as to encompass collections that remained on
the move and were transported around in cases and chests. The latter is a
broad umbrella under which hover not merely manuscripts, registers, rolls
and charters, but also commonplace and account books, antiquarian tran-
scriptions, ecclesiastical histories, printed tomes, ephemera broadsides,
paintings and written traces of oral tradition, rumour and speech.
Blurring the boundaries between creation and consumption, manufacture
and use, the contributors to this volume are interested as much in process as
in end-product. They examine the political, economic, religious, social and
cultural conditions in which record-keeping occurred and shift attention
27
Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence, Containing a Compleat English Rhetorique
(London, 1654), 194.
28
Theophile Bonet, A Guide to the Practical Physician (London, 1686), 689.
29
See, for example, Guido delle Colonne, The Life and Death of Hector One, and the First of
the Most Puissant, Valiant, and Renowned Monarches of the World (London, 1614), 56
(‘valiant acts he did archive’); and Paolo Giovio, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius,
Contayning a Discourse of Rare Inventions (London, 1585), sig. D3v (‘I wil striue with
mine owne vertue, to archive that, which the Horoscopus doth promise me’.)
30
See OED, ‘keep’, sense 29d.
from the locations of archival activity to its wider ramifications as a cultural

practice. Approaching the archive as both an ideological and a sociological
phenomenon, they explore how it shaped and was shaped by dynamic inter-
actions between individuals and communities and by the quotidian circum-
stances of life. Crossing the divide between the institutional and official and

the local and personal, they seek to recover the behaviours which led to the
creation of records and the public and private repositories in which they were
housed, alongside the multifarious ways in which writing and document-
making became implicated in social relations.
II
ARCHIVES, INFORMATION, AND THE EARLY MODERN STATE
This Past and Present Supplement must be situated in the context of a cluster
of important historiographical developments. The first of these is the birth of
historical interest in archives and the concurrent revitalization of the discip-
line of archival science. Founded in 2002, the journal Archival Science has
been a leading forum for a new style of enquiry that has moved beyond the
traditional canonical definitions outlined above, broken out of its teleological
framework, and begun to tackle hitherto neglected aspects of its subject.
Particularly prominent in this project are Eric Ketelaar and Terry Cook,
though there have also been important interventions on archives as ‘institu-
tions of social memory’ by Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg.
Ketelaar and others have encouraged growing awareness of the ‘tacit narra-
tives’ and hidden modalities of authority and power that archives enshrine.
They have provoked us to approach them, like the past itself, as a foreign
country whose language we must learn to speak if we are to understand the
societies from which they arise.31 They have instructed us in the art of think-
ing with archives.
Provoked by the dramatic changes in record-keeping that have accompan-
ied the digital age, the efforts of these scholars to set traditional archivistics on
a fresh foundation have not only inspired fellow specialists, but also an emer-
ging cohort of historians.32 Ernst Posner’s 1972 classic monograph on the
31
Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives’, Archival Science, i (2001)1;
Cook, ‘The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country’; Terry Cook (ed.), Controlling the Past:
Documenting Society and Institutions: Essays in Honor of Helen Willa Samuels
(Chicago, 2011); Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past; Blouin and Rosenberg,
Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory. See also Sue McKemmish
et al. (eds.), Archives: Record Keeping in Society (Wagga Wagga, 2005).
32
A number of recent special issues have been devoted to the issue: Blair and Milligan (eds.),
‘Towards a Cultural History of Archives’; and Randolph C. Head (ed.), ‘Archival
ancient world has been supplemented by new explorations of ‘archives before

writing’, which describe the monumentalization of judicial decisions and of
historical memory in the civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near
East.33 Markus Friedrich’s recent survey of the rise of archival culture in late
medieval and early modern Europe, especially Germany, is a further mani-

festation of a wider trend that is placing record-keeping institutions, practices
and personnel from all periods of history under a penetrating spotlight. In
this volume, he directs our attention to the neglected seigneurial archives of
eighteenth-century France, charting the rise of a professional class of feudistes
whose activities shed light on how entrenched archives became in rural and
provincial society in the decades prior to the French Revolution. Not merely
satisfying demand but also fuelling new archival desires, their entrepreneurial
activities both refine and qualify traditional narratives about the development
of the archival profession in Europe.34
Meanwhile, our understanding of Italian archives and how they were
organized, indexed and catalogued is being transformed by the work of
Filippo de Vivo and a team of scholars funded by a major European
Research Council grant. De Vivo has exploded the myths that have accumu-
lated around the Venetian Cancelleria Secreta and shown that they reveal
more about the rhetoric of the self-styled Serene Republic than about political
realities. In other city states, including Florence, the demands of diplomacy
Knowledge Cultures in Europe, 1400–1900’, Archival Science, x, 3 (2010); Filippo de

Vivo, Andrea Guldi and Alessandro Silvestri (eds.), ‘Archival Transformations in Early
Modern Europe’, special issue, European History Quarterly, xlvi, 3 (2016); Elizabeth Yale
(ed.), ‘Focus: The History of Archives and the History of Science’, Isis, cvii (2016). See
also the two special issues on ‘The Archive’ in History of the Human Sciences, xi, 4
(November, 1998) and xii, 2 (May, 1999). Peter Burke sets some useful agendas in
‘Commentary’, Archival Science, vii (2007).
33
Ersnt Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Piera Ferioli et al.
(eds.), Archives before Writing: Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Oriolo
Romano, October 23–25, 1991 (Turin, 1994); Maria Brosius, Ancient Archives and
Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World (Oxford, 2003).
See also James O’Toole, ‘Back to the Future: Ernst Posner’s Archives in the Ancient World’,
American Archivist, lxvii (2004).
34
Markus Friedrich, Die Geburt des Archivs: eine Wissensgeschichte (Munich, 2013). See also
Michel Duchein, ‘The History of European Archives and the Development of the
Archival Profession in Europe’, American Archivist, lv (1992); Arndt Brendecke (ed.),
Praktiken der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2015), esp. section 9, ‘Archival Practices:
Producing Knowledge in Early Modern Repositories of Writing’.
and governance also fostered new techniques of record-keeping.35 Similar

processes in Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire have been investigated
by Randolph Head,36 while Arndt Brendecke has analyzed the royal archive of
the Spanish Crown founded by Charles V at Simancas in 1540 in response to
the Comuneros Revolt of 1520–1, during which many valuable charters were

lost. Brendecke illuminates its role in regulating political knowledge and in
operating as a ‘secure site for forgetting’ — a kind of safe-deposit box to
which documents unsuitable for unrestricted circulation could be
dispatched.37
These studies are part of a wider interest in official archives and their
architects as ‘epistemic environments’.38 Exemplary here is Jacob Soll’s pi-
oneering study of Louis XIV’s chief minister, manager and mastermind of
information, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, which presents him as the spider at the
centre of the vast web of written intelligence that he wove around him.39 But
the encyclopaedic coverage and centralization to which Colbert aspired hide
the messier and patchier situation that prevailed on the ground, as well as the
ways in which officials contested, challenged and manipulated the records of
which they had charge.40
In England as in France, the ‘information state’ was highly reliant on the
co-operation of an ‘unacknowledged republic’ of unpaid local office-holders
in its villages, towns and provinces, by whom its authority was mediated and
often diluted and compromised.41 The civic and parochial records to which
35
Filippo de Vivo, ‘Ordering the Archive in Early Modern Venice (1400–1650)’, Archival
Science, x (2010) and Filippo de Vivo, ‘Coeur de l’État, lieu de tension: le tournant
archivistique vu de Venise (XVe–XVIIe siècle’, Annales HSS, lxviii (2013); Filippo de
Vivo, Andrea Guldi, and Alessandro Silvestri (eds), Archivi e Archivisti in Italia tra
Medioevo ed età moderna (Rome, 2015); and de Vivo, Guldi and Silvestri (eds.),
‘Archival Transformations in Early Modern Europe’.
36
Randolph C. Head, ‘Mirroring Governance: Archives, Inventories and Political
Knowledge in Early Modern Switzerland and Europe’, Archival Science, vii (2007).
37
Arndt Brendecke, ‘‘‘Arca, Archivillo, Archivo’’: The Keeping, Use and Status of Historical
Documents about the Spanish Conquista’, Archival Science, x (2010).
38
Ibid., 268. See also Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot
(Cambridge, 2000), ch. 6, ‘Controlling Knowledge: Churches and States’.
39
Soll, Information Master.
40
See Giora Sternberg, ‘Manipulating Information in the Ancient Régime: Ceremonial
Records, Aristocratic Strategies, and the Limits of the State Perspective’, Journal of
Early Modern History, lxxxv (2013).
41
Mike Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge,
2000); Eddie Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of
Information on Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2004), ch. 3; Paul Slack, ‘Government
their activities gave rise are starting to be scrutinized for the insights they yield
into how policy was both communicated to and concealed from the people
whom they represented and over whom they ruled. Concealed in locked
cupboards and chests and literally erased and scrubbed out, the archives of
guilds and vestries in early modern London guarded secrets from citizens and

skilfully manipulated information as a tactic of government.42 As Andy
Wood shows in his study of the Great Yarmouth Hutch in this volume,
urban oligarchies beyond the metropolis controlled access to the past and
repressed alternative versions that ran counter to those that buttressed their
power. Expressions of a nascent bourgeois public sphere, the local histories
written by middling-sort authors nevertheless preserve traces of the ‘hidden
histories’ of groups they sought to exclude. Such studies permit us a glimpse
of a world in which the control and omniscience of the centre was imperfect.
If they allow us to ‘see like a state’, it is a state that sits uncomfortably in the
mould of the modern bureaucratic regimes examined by James C. Scott in the
celebrated book in which he coined this phrase.43 It fits uneasily within the
Weberian paradigm of administrative rationalization that has long under-
pinned the history of archives as a discipline.
The work of historians of the emerging empires of the early modern world
has also been vital in complicating these models. Herman Bennett, Kathryn
Burns and Sylvia Sellers-Garcia have delved into the prolific archives of im-
perial Spain and Portugal and demonstrated how documents overcame the
tyranny of distance that separated European capitals from their colonial
settlements overseas.44 With students of modern colonial regimes, they are
demonstrating that a Foucauldian vision of the archive as a tool of domin-
ation and a panopticon obscures the participation of multiple other actors
and Information in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, no. 184 (Aug.
2004). For office-holders, see Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-
Holding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded,
c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001).
42
Paul Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and Authority in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
London’, Historical Journal, xl (1997).
43
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
have Failed (New Haven and London, 1998). See also Randolph C. Head, ‘Knowing Like a
State: The Transformation of Political Knowledge in Swiss Archives, 1450–1770’, Journal
of Modern History, lxxv (2003).
44
Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole
Consciousness 1570–1640 (Bloomington, Ind., 2003); Burns, Into the Archive; Sylvia
Sellers-Garcı́a, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford,
2014).
and their capacity to utilize them for purposes at odds with those of official-
dom.45 The information orders they are excavating were not merely imperfect
agents of conquest and surveillance. They were also entangled with and
shaped by indigenous systems of knowledge formation in ways that question
standard accounts of the rise of orientalism and carve out room for subaltern

intervention.46 In this volume, John Paul Ghobrial’s investigation of the role
of scholarly migrants from the Ottoman world in transporting and copying
many of the Arabic manuscripts that now reside in European archives like-
wise challenges the Eurocentric bias of its conventional intellectual history
and compels us to recognize a wider range of social agents in their creation.
If earlier work on archives focused almost exclusively on those generated by
governments and incipient nation states, more recent studies have investi-
gated the spread of archival consciousness in other institutional settings,
including commercial, diplomatic and religious ones. As Miles Ogborn com-
ments in his exploration of the English East India Company, understanding
the mechanics of trade between Europe and Asia requires attention to ‘the
geography of writing’.47 The same insight underpins Ghobrial’s recent recon-
struction of the ‘information flows’ between late seventeenth-century
Istanbul, Paris and London, using the working archive of ingoing and outgo-
ing correspondence compiled by William Trumbull, ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire.48 It also illuminates the activities of religious orders such
as the Society of Jesus, whose exceptional dedication to record-keeping was
an intrinsic arm of their global missionary enterprise.49 With regard to the
newly formed Protestant Churches of northern Europe, historians have
begun to illuminate how the Reformation and associated processes such as
45
A particularly important contribution on modern colonial archives is Ann Laura Stoler,
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton,
2009). See also Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire
(London, 1993). On the archive as a panoptical device, see Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival
Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science, ii (2002).
46
A key intervention and inspiration here is C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information:
Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996).
47
Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India
Company (Chicago and London, 2007), 5.
48
John-Paul A. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and
Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013).
49
Markus Friedrich, ‘Archives as Networks: The Geography of Record-Keeping in the
Society of Jesus (1540–1773)’, Archival Science, x (2010); Luke Clossey, Salvation and
Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 9.
the dissolution of the monasteries in Henrician England both transformed

and initiated new archival regimes.50 Weapons in the violent disputes that
splintered Christendom and provoked wars of religion, archives themselves
sometimes became the targets of real, threatened or feared destruction. In
north-western Germany in the face of imminent military action, they were

packed into boxes and tubs for removal and safe-keeping.51
It has also become clear that some of the very techniques by which modern
scholars still authenticate documents had their roots in the confessional
struggles that punctuated the early modern period. As Randolph Head has
demonstrated, the auxiliary science of diplomatics was a product of the de-
bates about juridical proof that emerged around 1700: credited to the
Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon, its foundation and subsequent institution-
alization as the primary method of testing the reliability of sources has served
to eclipse the part played by the archive in constructing meaning.52
III
WRITING, PRINT, AND THE WORLD OF SCRIBES
The impulses that drove the formation of archives must be connected with a
wider set of incentives that fostered the spread of record-keeping in the early
modern world. In particular, they need to be brought into closer dialogue with
the histories of literacy and communication. A critical starting point is Michael
Clanchy’s landmark study of the shift From Memory to Written Record pub-
lished in 1979, which charted the proliferation of bureaucratic activity in the
wake of the land transactions precipitated by the Norman Conquest of 1066
and the rise of a ‘literate mentality’ among the polyglot elite.53 This has sti-
mulated interest in recovering the ‘documentary culture’ of the early medieval
European laity concealed in the monastic and ecclesiastical archives of late
antique Africa, Carolingian Francia and Anglo-Saxon England.54 It has also set
50
Nicholas Popper, ‘From Abbey to Archive: Managing Texts and Records in Early Modern
England’, Archival Science, x (2010); Vanessa Harding, ‘Monastic Records and the
Dissolution: A Tudor Revolution in the Archives?’, European History Quarterly, xlvi
(2016); Mareike Menne, ‘Confession, Confusion, and Rule in a Box? Archival
Accumulation in Northwestern Germany in the Age of Confessionalization’, Archival
Science, x (2010).
51
Menne, ‘Confession, Confusion, and Rule in a Box?’, 310.
52
Randolph C. Head, ‘Documents, Archives, and Proof around 1700’, Historical Journal, lvi
(2013). A point of comparison is Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History
(London, 1997).
53
Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record in England, 1066–1307 (London, 1979).
54
Warren C. Brown et al. (eds.), Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 2013).
key agendas for historians of record-keeping in the adjacent periods. It has

supplied questions to guide those who seek to understand the longer-term
transition from a predominantly oral society to an increasingly, if only partially
literate one in the early modern era. It has alerted us to how the technology and
products of writing seep into social strata that include many people who do not

possess the capacity to use them.55
In most of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the handwritten
text still took second place to the spoken word as the medium by which most
information circulated, although the balance between them was altering
against the backdrop of educational changes linked with the Renaissance
and the technical innovations connected with the invention of the mechan-
ized press.56 Reading, which was conventionally taught first, was clearly more
widespread than the ability to write, but there is growing evidence of the
downward social diffusion of the arts of inscription and writing in popular
as well as learned circles. Juliet Fleming has found graffiti in unlikely places:
on pots, walls and bodies, as well as parchment and paper.57 In elite circles,
‘scribal publication’ remained a preferred and safer route for disseminating
seditious messages and sensitive news long after the advent of print and his-
torians and literary scholars alike have traced the vibrancy of manuscript
culture in the guise of separates, letters and verse libels, in both rural and
urban settings.58 In Venice, for instance, the pasquinades and relazioni posted
in piazzas and circulated through the streets were part of an extraordinarily
55
On the history of writing, see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the
English Renaissance (Stanford, 1990); Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing (Lasalle, Ill.,
1986); Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Chicago, 1994); Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture
from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2007).
56
On these transitions, see, among others, Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the World (London, 1982).
57
Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts in Early Modern England (Philadelphia,
2001).
58
Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993);
François Weil, ‘La function du manuscript par rapport à l’imprimé’, in François
Moureau (ed.), De bonne main. La communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
1993); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–
1640 (Oxford, 1996); Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and
the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge, 2003); Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham
(eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004); David D. Hall, Ways of
Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England
(Philadelphia, 2008), ch. 2.
rich system of political communication in which all levels of citizen, from

barber to patrician, participated.59 Unauthorized copies of sermons delivered
by celebrated Protestant preachers that circulated scribally were another
symptom of the creative expansion of literacy. The collections of transcrip-
tions that survive in the British Isles and elsewhere constitute a kind of archive

of devotion and piety.60 The elaborate systems of shorthand that developed to
enable avid hearers to take down the words of the clergy ever more efficiently
are another testament to the growing impulse to keep records of ephemeral
performances: as early as 1549, the French Huguenot Denis Raguenier
devised a form of speed-writing ‘by number and cipher’ to take notes of
Jean Calvin’s sermons in Geneva and several manuals outlining the principles
of ‘characterie’ or ‘brachigraphy’ were published in late sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century England. After preaching at Paul’s Cross in 1621, one minister
complained of the ‘bastard and illegitimate Copies . . . which wandred up and
down the Town, like vagrants; and were taken Begging, here for a Crown; and
there for an Angel’. Demand for such texts helped to foster a metropolitan
industry in manuscript production.61
In the city and country alike, an army of amateur and professional clerks,
notaries, scribes and amanuenses arose to meet demand for chirographic
skills in commercial, legal and personal contexts. In delineating the contours
of the early modern cultures of record-keeping that are the subject of this
volume, humble private users of the pencil and quill must be set alongside the
men — and women — who made a living from wielding them. The paper trail
left by the Dutch notary Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam, who worked in the fur
trading settlement of Albany in seventeenth-century North America, has
enabled Donna Merwick to write a fascinating micro-history of his life and
tragic death, utilizing the stories he recorded and then archived in a trunk.
Keith Wrightson has painted an equally compelling portrait of the scrivener,
Ralph Taylor, who wrote the last wills, testaments and inventories of many of
those who died of plague in Newcastle in 1636. His meticulous work casts
fresh light on the rise of a profession that was becoming increasingly necessary
at a time when people were coming to rely ever more heavily on bills, bonds,
59
Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern
Politics (Oxford, 2007), esp. ch. 4.
60
I owe this point to Alex Campbell.
61
Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640
(Cambridge, 2010), 138–47, quotation at 138 from John Andrewes, The Brazen
Serpent: Or, the Copie of a Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse (London, 1621), sig. A3v.
indentures, conveyances and other legal instruments.62 Even the illiterate

majority lived ‘in a matrix of parchment and paper’.63 Jennifer Bishop’s
essay in this collection is a no less illuminating piece of detective work: focus-
ing on Ralph Robinson and Goldsmith’s Company, it reveals the intercon-
nections between administrative record-keeping and literary creativity and

demonstrates how such figures fiddled and falsified the books.64
Notaries are another comparatively neglected category of actors in early
modern society. Laurie Nussdorfer has investigated their role as ‘brokers
of public trust’ in Renaissance and Baroque Rome, against the backdrop of
burgeoning urban commerce, a contractual economy, and the growth of civil
and private dispute. Her insights into the ambiguous position of these arti-
sans in the interstices between market and state are extended in her contri-
bution here. As she shows, under Sixtus V they became a closed corporation
of venal office-holders with a vested interest in promoting the use of their own
services and in preserving records that carried the greatest potential for future
earnings.65 Meanwhile, Kathryn Burns has taken us into the world of a class of
document-makers in colonial Cuzco in Peru whose reputation for corruption
and greed sat uneasily with their responsibility for certifying truth. ‘Always in
implicit dialogue with an imagined litigious future’, the formulaic records
they produced in accordance with conventional protocols are spaces in which
we can nevertheless trace the play of power relations.66 The voluminous
archives that have provided the basis for these imaginative studies remind
us not merely of the pervasiveness of writing in these societies but of the
dramatic increase in the supply of cheap paper by which it was fed and
which in turn it fuelled.
The rise of papermaking on an industrial scale was also a vital precondition
for another development that both facilitated and transformed the keeping of
records: what Elizabeth Eisenstein famously described as ‘the printing
62
Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca,
1999); Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague
(New Haven, 2011), esp. ch. 6.
63
C. W. Brooks, R. M. Helmholz and P. G. Stein, Notaries Public in England since the
Reformation (London, 1991), 84.
64
On town clerks, see also Andrew Butcher, ‘The Functions of Script in the Speech
Community of a Late Medieval Town, c.1300–1550’, in Crick and Walsham (eds.),
Uses of Script and Print.
65
Laurie Nussdorfer, ‘Writing and the Power of Speech: Notaries and Artisans in Baroque
Rome’, in Barbara Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (eds.), Culture and Identity in Early
Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Ann Arbor, 1993) and Laurie Nussdorfer, Brokers of
Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, 2009).
66
Burns, ‘Notaries, Truth and Consequences’, 373; Burns, Into the Archive.
revolution’.67 While some of her grander claims have since been refined, the
advent of the press undoubtedly altered the landscape of communication and
the conditions of knowledge formation in fundamental ways. A lingering
sense of the ‘stigma’ of resorting to so promiscuous a medium as print
made some distrustful of its products and temperamentally reluctant to

take advantage of the opportunities afforded by its invention.68 The fidelity
and uniformity it seemed to promise too often proved illusory and it fre-
quently proved to be an engine for cumulative error.69 Yet what Lucien
Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin called ‘L’apparition du livre’ (‘The Coming
of the Book’) ultimately proved unstoppable.70
Print not merely facilitated the rise of an international republic of letters
and the evolution of novel concepts of authorship. The promise of durability
and permanence that it seemed to offer assisted contemporaries in staving off
the danger of losing the treasures of their cultural and intellectual heritage. In
his Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, the humanist Conrad Gesner expressed the
hope that the press, in conjunction with princely patronage, would prevent
the haemorrhage of ancient manuscripts. Typography also held out the pos-
sibility of creating a reproducible archive of the writings of famous men which
might otherwise disappear into oblivion.71 Elizabeth Yale has provocatively
argued that early modern naturalists invented the archive in order to preserve
the ephemeral products of their conversations and scribal exchanges for their
successors.72 In a similar way, the Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury,
Matthew Parker, saw published editions of sources as a far safer way of
67
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979);
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,
1996); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(London, 1962). On the ‘paper revolution’, see R. J. Lyall, ‘Materials: The Paper
Revolution’, in Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (eds.), Book Production and
Publishing in Britain 1375–1475 (Cambridge, 1989).
68
The classic intervention is J. W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social
Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, i (1951).
69
See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago,
1998), esp. ch. 2.
70
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard
(London and New York, 1976).
71
Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca Universalis (Zurich, 1545), quoted in Ann Blair,
‘Introduction’, Archival Science, x (2010), 198.
72
Elizabeth Yale, ‘With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the
Archive’, Book History, xii (2009); Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History
and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia, 2016), ch. 6.
preserving the material he and his circle of antiquaries gathered from the
libraries of defunct religious houses than the originals he collected and be-
queathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In his eyes, the rich deposit
of manuscripts now synonymous with him was a less secure and more fragile
archive than the sixteenth-century histories that were assembled from

them.73
Print also enabled the development of a new culture for the transmission of
information. Alongside the ephemeral pamphlets and broadsides that poured
from presses across Europe to satisfy the thirst of consumers, one chief hall-
mark of this was the emergence, starting in the Low Countries, of the regular
serial newspaper reporting foreign and domestic affairs. The spread of
printed texts did not erode the culture of scribal production so much as
coexist symbiotically with it. The latter flourished as a means of evading
the restrictions of state and clerical censorship, but even in situations
where this collapsed spectacularly (such as in 1640s England) it remained a
powerful ingredient in forging public opinion.74 Awareness of the tremen-
dous resilience of written culture in the face of technological change is an-
other critical launching pad for this collection of essays.
No less important is the metamorphosis which the discipline of bibliog-
raphy has undergone over the last half-century. Rechristened by D. F.
McKenzie as ‘the sociology of texts’ in his Panizzi Lectures of 1985, it has
become an interdisciplinary social history of the book.75 Following in the
footsteps of pioneering Annaliste historians such as Roger Chartier, scholars
have learnt to approach printed texts not simply as containers of ideas and
vessels of thought but as physical artefacts and commodities that have their
own complex histories.76 They have investigated the intricate conjunctions
between the materiality of textual objects — their fonts, page formats, para-
texts, and cloth, leather and metal bindings — and the construction of mean-
ing. Building on these foundations, recent work by Jessica Berenbeim has
73
See Anthony Grafton, ‘Matthew Parker: History as Archive’, The Sandars Lectures,
Cambridge University Library, 26–28 January 2016, 5http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/
21670934(accessed 27 May 2016).
74
See Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart
England (Cambridge, 2016); Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English
Revolution (Cambridge, 2013), esp. 238–46.
75
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, 1999).
76
Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane (Princeton, 1987); Roger Chartier (ed.), The Culture of Print: Power and the
Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1989).
begun to illuminate the visual dimensions of record-keeping itself: the ‘art of

documentation’.77
Scholars have also increasingly moved beyond questions about the creation
and composition of these objects to the problem of reception and use. They
have recovered how readers could appropriate and personalize texts in

myriad ways and subvert the professed intentions of their authors.
Especially through the study of surviving annotations, they have shown
how the flyleaves and margins of books functioned as interactive and collab-
orative environments in which heated debate and dialogue took place and in
which people engaged in private meditation.78 Virginia Reinburg’s inspiring
exploration of French books of hours between 1400 and 1600 presents these
quasi-liturgical texts as ‘archives of prayer’. Preserving and ordering images
and intercessions for the use of their original purchasers and subsequent
owners, they operated as a link between the official liturgy of the Church
and the domain of the home.79
Reinburg’s work is one welcome sign that the artificial divide between
bibliography and codicology, book and manuscript studies, is beginning to
break down. Another is the closer attention that is being paid to contempor-
ary processes of collection and compilation as acts of literary creation them-
selves. Examining anthologized volumes in which print and manuscript are
intermingled, Jeffrey Todd Knight’s Bound to Read recovers discursive strat-
egies that have been concealed by modern routines of curatorship and re-
binding. It diverts our gaze away from the ‘self-enclosed book’ privileged by
later collectors and librarians towards the inherently fluid and malleable
nature of early modern texts which their interventions have disguised.80
Todd underlines the point that contemporary modes of arrangement and
organization imposed meaning on the materials of which compilations are
made. His findings converge with those that are emerging from histories of
collecting more generally and provide another model for how to write the
77
See, for example, John N. King (ed.), Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the
Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 2010). Other recent interventions on the material
culture of record-keeping include Jessica Berenbeim, Art of Documentation: Documents
and Visual Culture in Medieval England (Toronto, 2015) and Lisa Gitelman, Paper
Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham and London, 2014).
78
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia,
2008).
79
Viriginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c.1400–1600
(Cambridge, 2012), 4.
80
Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of
Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia, 2013), 15.
social history of the archive. Marjorie Swann comments that collections are
‘always steeped in ideology’. Sites of self-fashioning that serve to reinforce or
undermine dominant categories, they are themselves ‘modes of
subjectivity’.81

IV
LIBRARIES, COLLECTING, AND THE CREATION OF KNOWLEDGE
The public and private libraries and museums founded in the early modern
period reflect the insatiable itch for accumulating manuscripts, books, sci-
entific specimens and exquisitely crafted artefacts that underpinned the cul-
ture of curiosity that emerged in this era.82 The most imposing monument to
this impulse in Habsburg Spain was Philip II’s Escorial, which housed thou-
sands of ancient texts alongside modern humanist classics and his massive
collection of relics.83 In Italy too the instincts to possess the past and to
possess nature developed in tandem with each other.84 In Protestant
Europe, libraries evolved in distinctive ways as a consequence of the
Reformation. They were by-products of the dispersal of manuscripts from
dissolved religious houses and of the determination of figures such as John
Leland, John Bale and Matthew Parker to preserve selected medieval textual
relics before they disappeared. The decisions made by these churchmen and
scholars about what to salvage and what to discard have been scrutinized by
Jennifer Summit. Her book Memory’s Library is a timely and important re-
minder of how far the manuscript collections upon which we now rely bear
the distinctive imprint of the theological priorities and prejudices of those
who compiled them. Sifted through the dual filter of an empowering
Protestant narrative of history and reformed intolerance of ‘popish
81
Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England
(Philadelphia, 2001), 8.
82
On libraries, see Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, i, To 1640 (Cambridge, 2006). On museums,
cabinets of curiosities and collecting, see Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds.), The
Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
Europe (Oxford, 1985); Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories
(Wiesbaden, 1998); Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and
Germany (Oxford, 2004); R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (eds.), Curiosity and
Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2006).
83
Mark P. MacDonald, ‘The Print Collection of Philip II at the Escorial’, Print Quarterly, xv
(1998); Guy Lazure, ‘Possessing the Sacred: Monarchy and Identity in Philip II’s Relic
Collection at the Escorial‘, Renaissance Quarterly, lx (2007).
84
Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early
Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994).
superstition’, the documents that comprise them bore witness to a partisan

version of the English past and buttressed an exclusive understanding of
religious ‘truth’. These preoccupations were bequeathed to later generations
of antiquaries such as Robert Cotton and Thomas James, keeper of the
Bodleian. Side-effects of a volatile political struggle to redefine the ‘Middle

Ages’, these libraries mediate it to us in ways that we have been surprisingly
slow to recognize.85 Their status as polemical weapons in the wider battle
between rival confessions over the ground of sacred history should give us
pause for thought.86 Sites of active epistemological construction, they im-
prison our enquiries within interpretative straitjackets that are not of our own
making. In a similar way, our attitude to the hallowed objects that the re-
formers denigrated and repudiated as focal points for idolatry has been af-
fected by the locations into which they migrated after the upheavals of the
sixteenth century, where they were not actually casualties of these events.
Ejected from cathedrals and shrines into spaces and buildings where they
sat alongside fossils, fragments of bone, Roman coins, and plant specimens
their significance changed. In these settings, viewing them ceased to be
fraught with spiritual danger.87 Modern museums are places that perpetuate
these early modern acts of desacralization and unwittingly reinforce reformed
values anew.88
Patterns of archival selection, collection, disposal and retention were
shaped by other tumultuous events in ways that are only now becoming
the subject of detailed investigation. Too often mined as a treasury of reliable
facts, the assorted material written and gathered by Pierre de L’Estoile, for
instance, has contaminated and coloured understanding of the French Wars
of Religion since the later sixteenth century, as Tom Hamilton shows in a
forthcoming monograph. In his essay on L’Estoile’s ‘Drolleries’ below, he
argues that this collection of printed ephemera must itself be seen as an act of
iconoclasm, a scrapbook of ‘trifles’ and ‘false idols’ designed to provoke a
cathartic, scornful laughter.89 Civil war and sectarian violence all affected the
85
Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago,
2008).
86
See Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (eds.), Sacred History:
Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012).
87
Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1700
(Oxford, 2003), 191–7.
88
James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition
(Oxford, 2010).
89
Tom Hamilton, A Storehouse of Curiosities: Pierre de L’Estoile and his World in the Wars of
Religion (Oxford, forthcoming).
content and character of the collections of books, writings and records that
have come down to us in ways that demand careful analysis. So too do other
gaps and silences in libraries and archives. Anxious about the afterlife of their
correspondence, some politicians and their secretaries literally set fire to their
letters lest they come back to haunt them. Arnold Hunt writes of the ‘shadowy

counter practices’ designed to keep damaging things out of official files that
developed in this period alongside new techniques of record-keeping,90 while
Elizabeth Yale describes how the papers of the mid seventeenth-century in-
telligencer Samuel Hartlib were mutilated after his death in 1662 by various
persons (possibly including John Milton) eager to remove from them items
that cast their activities during the former Commonwealth and Protectorate
in a bad light.91 It was partly fear that their own manuscripts might suffer the
same fate that led some scholars and natural philosophers to deposit their
literary remains in newly established repositories such as the Ashmolean
Museum. One of these was John Aubrey, whose concern to preserve old
papers, ‘like fragments of a shipwreck’ from the mistaken hands of zeal, do-
mestic and utilitarian recycling, and the depredations of time, is well docu-
mented. At the same time, he actively shaped his own legacy by throwing away
material that he deemed too frivolous and ‘light’.92 The apparently arbitary
accidents of survival that dictate the foci and direction of historical enquiry
frequently turn out to be the function of contemporary archiving strategies.
The subfield in which these processes have been most effectively investi-
gated to date is the history of science. Its historians have proved to be far more
attuned to how ‘the overall physiognomy of the archive’ has been affected by
contingent developments and by the interventions of contemporary actors
than most of their colleagues.93 They have taught us to see the collections of
the Royal Society and Académie des Sciences de Paris as projections of a sense
of corporate identity and dissected the ways in which the reputation of sci-
entists such as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle was moulded and manufac-
tured by the custodians of their papers. The latter pruned out letters from
alchemists and other ‘enthusiasts’ that smacked of ‘superstition’ and seemed
90
Arnold Hunt, ‘‘‘Burn this Letter’’: Preservation and Destruction in the Early Modern
Archive’, in James Daybell and Andrew Gordon (eds.), Cultures of Correspondence in
Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia, 2016).
91
Yale, ‘With Slips and Scraps’, 22–3.
92
Michael Hunter, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Archives of the Scientific
Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe
(Woodbridge, 1998), 11; Elizabeth Yale, ‘The Book and the Archive in the History of
Science’, Isis, cvii (2016).
93
Hunter, ‘Introduction’, 11; Yale, ‘The History of Archives’, 351–8.
to impugn the seriousness of their other intellectual endeavours.94 The order

in which the numerous workbooks and loose manuscripts, which the Dutch
mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens left to the University of
Leiden after he died in 1695, was placed by his early eighteenth-century and
later editors has likewise affected how they have been understood and read.95

In turn we need to acknowledge how particular styles of writing and
record-keeping have been instrumental in determining which aspects of
knowledge about the natural world came to be canonized as true. Here the
insights of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have been especially inspiring.
In their work on mid seventeenth-century empiricism, they have argued that
its triumph as the predominant mode of establishing scientific truth was
integrally linked to the cultural practices by which the gentlemen who advo-
cated it attained trust and credibility in contemporary society.96 Equally rele-
vant to the themes of this volume are recent studies of ‘paper technologies’ —
lists, diagrams, tables, and the ubiquitous notebooks in which Baconian sci-
entists recorded their observations — as epistemological instruments them-
selves. The manner in which people organized, précised, preserved and
retrieved data was not incidental but integral to how botanical, zoological,
geological, astrological and palaeontological knowledge was forged.97 To
quote Anke te Heesen, scraps and slips of paper on which extracts were
written were ‘the smallest material text-units of intellectual work’.98 The
cut-and-paste methods employed by Ulisse Aldrovandi in late sixteenth-cen-
tury Italy, are amply documented in the four hundred volumes of his
94
Hunter, ‘Introduction’, 8, 11. More detailed discussions are provided in Michael Hunter,
‘Mapping the Mind of Robert Boyle: The Evidence of the Boyle Papers’; and Rob Iliffe, ‘A
‘‘Connected System’’? The Snare of a Beautiful Hand and the Unity of Newton’s Archive’,
in Hunter (ed.), Archives of the Scientific Revolution.
95
Joella Yoder, ‘The Archives of Christiaan Huygens and his Editors’, in Hunter (ed.),
Archives of the Scientific Revolution.
96
See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
England (Chicago and London, 1994); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and
the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985). Johns, Nature of
the Book adopts a similar approach.
97
See Richard Yeo, ‘Between Memory and Paperwork: Baconianism and Natural History’,
History of Science, xlv (2007); and Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early
Modern Science (Chicago, 2014).
98
Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook: A Paper Technology’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
(eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 585.
See also J. Andrew Mendelsohn, ‘The World on a Page: Making a General Observation in
the Eighteenth Century’, in Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (eds.), Histories of
Scientific Observation (Chicago, 2011).
manuscripts that survive, while the systems of nomenclature and classifica-

tion of species of plants now synonymous with the eighteenth-century
Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus evolved from his compulsive practice of
indexing.99 In the words of Lorraine Daston, the early modern ‘sciences of the
archive’ were also sciences of the library: ‘Reading and seeing, collecting

words and collecting things were closely intertwined practices in the study
of nature during this period’.100
The tools characteristic of this ‘hybrid hermeneutics’101 played a critical
part in the making of medical knowledge and practice too, as Hannah
Murphy emphasizes in her essay on the archive and library of the
Nuremberg physician Georg Palma in this volume. As an epistemological
praxis, writing was integral to sixteenth-century German medicine. While it
did not alone drive or determine diagnosis or strategies for cure, as Lauren
Kassell has shown, it did shape encounters between doctors and patients and
assist physicians in identifying the diseases that afflicted their clients. Key
elements in early modern ‘healing dynamics’, the many casebooks that sur-
vive were not just retrospective summaries of clinical outcomes. Circulating
in both manuscript and print, they also served to advertise expertise, dissem-
inate sound methods, register symptoms and record remedies and improve
understanding of the mysterious human body. In short, early modern medi-
cine and astrology were predictive arts that depended upon the use of paper
and pen.102 They attest to the cross-fertilization of the cultures of record-
keeping that emerged in a variety of spheres of contemporary activity, and to
99
On Aldrovandi, see Fabian Kraemer, ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonicon and
the Use of Paper Technology in Renaissance Natural History’, Early Science and Medicine,
xix (2014). For Linnaeus, see Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, ‘Natural
History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences, xliii (2012); Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, ‘Lists
as Research Technologies’, Isis, ciii (2012).
100
Lorraine Daston, ‘The Sciences of the Archive’, Osiris, xxvii (2012), 174. See also Isabelle
Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Worlds of Paper: An Introduction’, Early
Modern Science and Medicine, xix (2014).
101
Charmantier and Müller-Wille, ‘Worlds of Paper’, 180.
102
Lauren Kassell, ‘Casebooks in Early Modern England: Medicine, Astrology, and Written
Records’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, lxxxviii (2014). The case books of Simon
Forman and Richard Napier are currently the subject of a major digitization initiative: see
5http://www.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk/4(accessed 27 May 2016). See also
Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, ‘Case and Series: Medical Knowledge and
Paper Technology, 1600–1900’, History of Science, xlviii (2010).
‘a complex ecosystem of imitation and exchange’ that encompassed many

different fields of enquiry.103
V
SCHOLARSHIP, PAPER TECHNOLOGIES, AND LIFE WRITING

One of the most important of these cultures of record-keeping was the world
of humanist scholarship, the distinctive techniques of which have been the
subject of several significant studies. None has been more influential than
Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know, an exploration of the strategies early modern
scholars devised to cope with the all too familiar experience of ‘information
overload’. Her book shows how the technological developments linked with
the advent of print provoked the Latinate elite to develop new ways of select-
ing, storing and sorting the volume of data that threatened to overwhelm
them, which (ironically) helped to feed the same phenomenon. The tools and
finding aids that emerged from these experiments included practices of note-
taking, excerpting and cross-referencing that are still critical to academic
practice today.104 Among the humanist scholars who have left substantial
traces of their working methods are Guillaume Budé, Joseph Scaliger, Conrad
Gesner and the German professor of medicine and natural philosophy
Joachim Jungius. Jungius’s collection ran to some 150,000 pages, some
45,000 of which are still extant.105
Although it had precedents and roots in the medieval practice of compiling
florilegia, the most pervasive and important of these humanist techniques was
the habit of commonplacing. Both a response to and a manifestation of the
Renaissance preoccupation with copia (abundance), it was the primary in-
tellectual device by which the intelligentsia arranged their reading, knowledge
and thought.106 As an educational device and a handy aide-memoire, the
103
See also Nicholas Popper, ‘Archives and the Boundaries of Early Modern Science’, Isis,
cvii (2016), 86.
104
Ann Blair, Too Much Too Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age
(Cambridge, Mass., 2010); Ann Blair, ‘The Rise of Note-taking in Early Modern Europe’
in Ann Blair and Richard Yeo (eds.), Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe, special issue,
Intellectual History Review, xx, 3 (2010). On the role of writing and reading technologies
in feeding the information explosion, see also Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘The many Books of
Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, lxiv (2003).
105
Blair, ‘Rise of Note-taking in Early Modern Europe’, 305–6.
106
Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought
(Oxford, 1996); Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and
Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2001). See also
Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in
commonplace book diffused itself widely within European society and must
be regarded as one of the contemporary arts of remembrance. As John Locke
wrote in his 1706 guide to making them, ‘Memory is the treasurey or
Storehouse’, but it needed to be properly organized. ‘It would be just for all
the World as serviceable as a great deal of Household-Stuff, when if we wanted

any particular Thing we could not tell where to find it’.107 Envisaged as an
artificial repository to aid the feeble human mind, the commonplace book
was a personal and portable archive of learning. Its utility as a tool of natur-
alists has already been noted, but this was not the only source of inspiration
for early modern scientists, as Valentina Pugliano’s research on northern
Italian apothecaries has shown. Her investigation of specimen lists suggests
these had precedents in the practices rooted in the drug and spice trades that
long pre-dated the rise of the humanist techniques described by Ann Blair.108
Note-taking and commonplacing were technologies compatible with the
mobility of the travelling merchant and grand tourist. The seventeenth-cen-
tury Englishman Robert Williams appears to have carried an archive of ‘re-
membrance’ books around with him in a trunk, together with registers and
ledgers recording cash, acquittances, inventories and accounts.109 Travel
journals recording exotic places, interesting sights, and associated anecdotes
were often kept for the edification of later generations of the aristocracy and
gentry.110 Nor were they confined to the educated elite: ‘middling sort’ arti-
sans and craftsmen and women also used them. Filled with poems, proverbs,
moral exempla and assorted historical information, the quarto notebook of
Ann Bowyer, the daughter of a Coventry draper, has close affinities with
printed dictionaries of quotations. Preserved only because her papers were
absorbed into the archive of her heir, Elias Ashmole, after she died of the
plague in Lichfield in 1646, it casts light on the hidden world of female literacy
W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English
Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghamton, 1993).
107
John Locke, New Method of Making Common Place-Books (London, 1706), p. ii, quoted in
te Heesen, ‘The Notebook’, 586. See also Richard Yeo, ‘John Locke’s ‘‘New Method’’ of
Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information’, Eighteenth-Century Thought, ii
(2004).
108
Valentina Pugliano, ‘Specimen Lists: Artisanal Writing or Natural Historical
Paperwork?’, Isis, ciii (2012).
109
See Jacob Soll, ‘How to Manage an Information State: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Archives
and the Education of his Son’, Archival Science, vii (2007), 333–4.
110
Jill Belper, ‘Travelling and Posterity: The Archive, the Library and the Cabinet’, in Rainer
Babel and Werner Paravicini (eds.), Grand Tour: Adeliges Reisen und Europäische Kultur
vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Ostfilden, 2005).
and record-keeping.111 So too do the books in which women recorded med-

ical recipes and practical knowledge about physic and diet necessary to pre-
serve the health of their households. Derived from vernacular publications as
well as oral tradition, such texts reveal how informal science operated in
parallel with the academy. Their survival in large numbers also reflects the

fact that they were collaborative creations frequently transmitted along
matrilineal lines as heirlooms and augmented by later family members. A
copy of the recipe book compiled by Lady Frances Catchmay includes a note
on the first folio indicating that she bequeathed it to her son William, ‘earn-
estly desiring and charging him to let every one of his brothers and sisters’
have a full or partial transcription of it. Her gift carried the responsibility of
passing on domestic lore to subsequent generations. Often incorporating
other miscellaneous information including births, marriages and deaths,
these manuscripts simultaneously functioned as memorials of dead relatives
and lost loved ones.112
These types of manuscript illustrate the need to situate record-keeping on a
continuum with life-writing. A number of developments converged with the
growth of literacy to encourage men and women to compose texts that may, with
a mild degree of anachronism, be described as forms of autobiography. Although
inflated claims about the critical role of the Renaissance in the rise of individu-
alism have been cut down to size, it did serve to cultivate the art of self-fashion-
ing.113 Another stimulus was the turn inwards to scrutinize the soul fostered by
both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. In Counter-Reformation
France, the religious writings of the seventeenth century, especially by women,
bear witness to impulses towards interiority that were full of contradictions.114 In
111
Victoria Burke, ‘Ann Bowyer’s Commonplace Book (Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 51):
Reading and Writing Among the ‘‘Middling Sort’’’, Early Modern Literary Studies, vi
(2001)5http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/06-3/burkbowy.htm4(accessed 27 May 2016). On
female reading and writing, see also Eleanor Hubbard, ‘Reading, Writing, and Initialing:
Female Literacy in Early Modern London’, Journal of British Studies, liv (2015). Surviving
manuscripts produced by the calligrapher Esther Inglis, the daughter of a Huguenot
immigrant to Scotland, for her clients include Folger Shakespeare Library,
Washington DC, MS V.a.91 and V.a.92.
112
Elaine Leong, ‘Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical
Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household’, Centaurus, lv (2013), 87; see also
Michelle Di Meo and Sara Pennell (eds.), Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800
(Manchester, 2013).
113
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago,
1980).
114
Nicholas Paige, Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in
Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 2001).
the war-torn Low Countries, anxieties about salvation were the backdrop against
which the Utrecht lawyer Arnoldus Buchelius gathered a voluminous archive of
personal papers. Reflecting his bewildered reaction to the turbulent events of the
time, they also chart his many spiritual shifts and conversions from Catholicism
to indifference, and from libertinism to Contra-Remonstrant Calvinism.115 In

pursuit of evidence that they numbered among the elect, fervent puritans in
England and Scotland assiduously catalogued their sins, shortcomings and af-
flictions alongside the benevolent providential interventions of God in their
everyday lives. As Tom Webster has acutely observed, the diaries and notebooks
kept by men and women such as the London woodturner Nehemiah Wallington
were not exercises in individual identity formation so much as a kind of ‘writing
to redundancy’.116
Intended to be read by kin, friends and descendants, these were texts that
operated in the context of a piety that was as communal in character as it was
introspective.117 Like the forms of ‘artisan autobiography’ studied by James
Amelang, they blur into a range of other genres, including chronicles, mem-
oirs, travel accounts, ledgers and letters and are frequently characterized by a
‘rhetoric of self-denigration’.118 Much of this material was the product of the
sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries, but in Italy the long tradition
of ricordanze or family books, in which the socially mobile mercantile elite
such as the dynasties of the Medici, Castellani, Gianni, Pelli and Pitti recorded
details of their genealogy to prove their economic and patrimonial rights
began much earlier. Flourishing especially in Tuscany between 1300 and
1500, by 1600 it had begun to decline, or at least to evolve into a different
form of memorialization.119
115
Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus
Buchelius, 1565–1641 (Manchester, 1999).
116
Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early
Modern Spirituality’, Historical Journal, xxxix (1996). See also David George Mullan,
Narratives of the Religious Self in Early Modern Scotland (Farnham, 2010).
117
Andrew Cambers, ‘Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720’,
Journal of British Studies, xlvi (2007).
118
James Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge and Stanford, 1999), 162–3.
119
Giovanni Ciappelli, Memory, Family and Self: Tuscan Family Books and Other European
Egodocuments (14th–18th Century) (Leiden, 2014), esp. ch. 15, ‘Memory and
Egodocuments in Early Modern Europe’. See also the important interventions of
Winfried Schulze, ‘Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte?
Vorüberlegungen für die Tagung ‘‘Ego-Dokumente’’’, in Winfried Schulze (ed.), Ego-
Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschicthe (Berlin, 1996), 11–30; and
The literary scholar Adam Smyth has drawn attention to ‘a culture of life-
writing whose very inclusivity and taxonomical strangeness’ requires the re-
visiting of some settled assumptions. Focusing on almanacs, parish registers,
commonplace books and financial accounts and redefining autobiography as
‘a retrospective, mediated, intertextual process’, Smyth’s monograph is help-

ing to break down conventional boundaries between utilitarian documents
and creative writing and inspiring new approaches to ostensibly dry, un-
promising and formulaic bureaucratic records.120 He and others are finding
subjectivity in unexpected places, including in texts that seemingly testify less
to the spread of literacy than of numeracy. Often seen as a symptom of the
birth of modern capitalism, double-entry book-keeping is being revealed as
one of the spheres in which contemporaries crafted the complex, ephemeral
and disputed entity that was the self and even gave expression to private
emotion.121
Several essays in this volume engage directly with these themes in different
ways. In his analysis of the account book of the Exchequer official Richard
Stonley, Jason Scott-Warren takes issue with Smyth’s heuristic use of the term
‘autobiography’ and warns that we should not allow the search for selfhood to
distort sources that have ‘a distinctly narrow interest in the individual’. He
suggests that Stonley’s manuscript is perhaps better seen as a type of ‘storage
space’ or ‘textual receptacle’. The financial records studied by Ann Hughes yield
unexpected insights into how the calamity of the Civil War was experienced in
local communities and by individuals whom we rarely have the opportunity to
hear. Products of the ‘pervasive culture of appraisal’ fostered by the mid seven-
teenth-century fiscal-military state, they provided an outlet for ordinary people
to recall and make sense of trauma, intrusion and loss. Other contributors are
interested in how administrative writing could function as a type of ‘status
performance’: in a case study of fifteenth-century Flanders, Frederik Buylaert
and Jelle Haemers investigate how record-keeping functioned as a form of self-
representation and served to illustrate the place of the nobility within an elite
community of honour. John Paul Ghobrial suggestively tests the distinction
between scholarship and autobiography. Drawing attention to the colophon as
a mechanism by which Eastern Christians recorded their private experience, his
work chimes well with François Joseph-Ruggiu’s recent collection calling for a
Rudolph Dekker (ed.), Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in its Social
Context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum, 2002).
120
Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), 1, 3.
121
Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of
Nations (London, 2014), ch. 2.
comparative global history of personal writing that integrates European and

Occidental perspectives.122
VI

RECORD-KEEPING AND REMEMBERING
A final historiographical framework for the present collection is the current
surge of interest in history and memory. As we have seen, contemporaries used
the word archive as a metaphor for the act and locus of recollecting the past;
they were also beginning to apply it to repositories that performed the function
of preserving its written traces rather than simply safeguarding documentation
of legal and business transactions that might be required as proof — to build-
ings that housed historical sources as well as living records. Archives themselves
were therefore in the process of becoming what Pierre Nora called lieux de
mémoire.123 The ‘genealogical gaze’ of the age helped to stimulate an interest in
family heraldry and history that engendered the distinctive forms of record-
keeping in Italy, England and the Netherlands discussed above.124 This
occurred in a context in which growing numbers of educated gentlemen as
well as professional scholars were becoming engaged in the pursuit of ‘antiqui-
ties’. It coincided with the popularization, if not democratization of the desire
to preserve tangible and textual vestiges of distant societies.125 Avid interest in
the local and national past also led men such as Sir Simonds D’Ewes to spend
their spare time sifting through the ‘sweete records’ in the Tower of London
and derive delight from acquiring prowess in palaeography.126 It fostered ef-
forts to preserve on paper and in print orally transmitted stories and legends.
Foreshadowing the activities of later folklorists, these often entailed a tussle
between the instinct to write down traditions that were in danger of disappear-
ing and a desire to suppress them as silly ‘superstitions’.127
122
François-Joseph Ruggiu (ed.), The Uses of First Person Writing: Africa, America, Asia,
Europe / Les Usages des écrits du for privé: Afrique, Amérique, Asie, Europe (Brussels, 2013).
123
Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, xvi
(1989).
124
Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, ch. 4; Eric Ketelaar, ‘The Genealogical Gaze: Family
Identities and Family Archives in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries’, Libraries &
the Cultural Record, xliv (2009).
125
Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, ch. 5.
126
J. Sears McGee, An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Stanford, 2015),
55–9.
127
See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins
of Folklore’, in S. A. Smith and Alan Knight (eds.), The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past
and Present (Past and Present Supplement no. 3, Oxford, 2008).
These impulses often converged with a concern about preserving traces of

their own world for posterity. The sixteenth-century Cologne city-councillor
Hermann Weinsberg, for example, compiled a huge three volume
Gedenkbuch, or ‘Memory Book’, filled with mundane and candid details of
daily life in the town. Such was his fear that his archive might suffer oblivion

that he ordered his heirs and executors to protect it from heat, humidity,
moths and bookworms and to duplicate it by making multiple copies.
Ironically, it owes its survival to an inheritance dispute that resulted in its
confiscation and deposit among the civic records, which (in a further twist of
fate that fulfilled Weinsberg’s own premonitions) were buried under rubble
when the building collapsed in 2009.128 The impulse to create a permanent
record of the present for future use steadily spread downwards socially, as
Judith Pollmann shows in her wide-ranging study of the practice of chronic-
ling. Mainly the work of literate males, these texts are best approached, she
suggests, less as a relic of a distinctively medieval mode of historiography than
as an idiosyncratic archive of local knowledge and information that could be
deployed at some later date.
Such material illuminates the workings of ‘memory before modernity’ and
the pools of shared remembrance which record-keeping both cemented and
created afresh.129 Recent work has underscored the dangers of accepting the
hegemony of the written word as the authoritative archive of social memory
and turned to the challenging task of recovering non-elite perceptions and
constructions of the past from other sources.130 Andy Wood has used thou-
sands of depositions recorded in contemporary law courts, to rescue how
ordinary men and women remembered immediate and remote events and
periods of time and used ‘custom’ as a protean cultural resource in the sphere
of social relations. His work sheds light on the politics of deliberate recollec-
tion and strategic amnesia alike.131 Other historians have moved beyond
written documents to the topographical features and man-made artefacts
128
Matthew Lundin, Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes his World
(Cambridge, Mass., 2012).
129
Erika Kuijpers et al. (eds.), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern
Europe (Leiden, 2013).
130
See Matthew Neufeld (ed.), ‘Uses of the Past in Early Modern England’, special issue,
Huntington Library Quarterly, lxxvi, 4 (2013). For an important earlier intervention, see
Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England: The Creighton Trust
Lecture 1983, Delivered before the University of London on Monday 21 November 1983
(London, 1983).
131
Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early
Modern England (Cambridge, 2013).
around which memory crystallized and emphasized the need to analyze ‘ten-
drils’, ‘footprints’, and ‘shadows’ of the past that were fixed in neither script
nor print.132 Here Mary Laven brings the archival turn into conversation with
the material turn, by examining how vernacular ex-voto paintings recorded
and authenticated miracles in Renaissance Italy. Drawing attention to the

‘certificatory role’ of these objects in buttressing local cults, her essay is a study
of the social history of a visual archive of divine mercies.
Early modern historical culture was reconfigured by other developments
that bear on the essays in this Supplement. Experiences of revolution and
destruction stimulated a new sensibility regarding the relationship between
the present, past and future that shaped ideas about chronology and time and
differentiated experienced from learned and inherited memory.133 As in the
case of earlier moments of upheaval and caesura, the period also saw energetic
efforts by monarchs, churches, cities and communities to harness the past to
legitimate political rule and competing forms of Christian truth and to shield
them against the damning charge of innovation in an age which revered
antiquity as the prime guarantee of authenticity. Alongside the writing of
ecclesiastical histories such as those by Matthias Flacius Illyricus and the
Magdeburg Centurians, one manifestation of the resurgence of sacred history
was the creation of archives, both virtual and physical.134 Martyrologies such
as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments straddled the boundary between a body
of interpretation and a compilation of original documents designed to prove
the veracity of his account. The subtle strategies of omission, selection and
massage of evidence Foxe employed have shaped understanding of the
English Reformation in both overt and insidious ways. Instead of debating
how far they compromise his work as a repository of facts, historians now
openly acknowledge their role in refracting our image of the past.135
Catholic history and hagiography must be read in similar ways. Ambitious
projects such as the Bollandist enterprise to compile the Acta Sanctorum were
132
Daniel Woolf, ‘Afterword: Shadows of the Past in Early Modern England’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, lxxvi (2013), 644.
133
Daniel Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the
Past 1500–1700’, Huntington Library Quarterly, lxviii (2005).
134
See Van Liere, Ditchfield and Louthan (eds.), Sacred History.
135
See esp. Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs’, in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.), Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in
Britain and the Netherlands (Zutphen, 1985); Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth, Lies and
Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography’, in D. R. Kelly and D. Harris
Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1997);
Thomas Freeman, ‘Fate, Faction and Fiction in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, Historical
Journal, xliii (2000).
also underpinned by a commitment to empiricism that obscures their status

as a form of polemic and seduces us into using them uncritically. In the case of
the spurious chronicles confected by the Toledo Jesuit, Jeronimo Roman de la
Higuera, it is necessary to set aside modern value judgements and approach
forgery and fabrication as modes of historical commentary and writing, as

well as an outgrowth of antiquarian enthusiasm. As Katrina Olds has demon-
strated, a ‘hermeneutic of pious affection’ has ensured that the influence of
the invented histories of Counter-Reformation Spain has been enduring.136
In this volume, Virginia Reinburg shows how French Catholic authors wrote
histories of miraculous shrines that at once invoked and created archives of
historical facts: like other historiographers their work demonstrated faith in
the truth of their sources, but it also preserved testimonies of witnesses to
supernatural interventions that helped to repair the ruination and rupture
caused by the religious wars.
Liesbeth Corens extends these insights in a different direction in her essay
on how the English Catholic diaspora mediated memory of the trials and
sufferings of their predecessors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by
creating counter archives that challenged the omissions and distortions of the
dominant Protestant narratives. Their choice of format — the documentary
compilation — was a crucial part of their claim to represent unvarnished
historical truth. Shedding light on how the members of this reluctant reli-
gious minority selectively edited and manipulated the material they collected
and transcribed, her work reinforces Jesse Spohnholz’s research on Germany
and the Netherlands. As he shows, strategies of archival organization, cat-
egorization and naming served to reinforce confessional and nationalist ac-
counts of the triumph of Calvinism in this region by ‘inventing’ a formal
conference critical to the progress of its Reformation. The long afterlife of the
1568 ‘synod’ or ‘convent’ of Wesel is a measure of the capacity of the decisions
made by contemporary and subsequent archivists to distort modern percep-
tions of the past. Eventually absorbed into anthologies that are monuments to
nineteenth-century historical positivism, documents attesting to this non-
event have deceived many generations of scholars.137 They reflect the con-
tinuing influence of epistemological assumptions that have their roots in the
era of Leopold von Ranke and the way in which archival decisions about
136
Katrina Olds, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (New
Haven and London, 2015), 288.
137
Walter Pohl offers some equally striking reflections on how the nineteenth-century edi-
torial project that led to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) has deeply influ-
enced perceptions of the medieval past: see his ‘History in Fragments: Montecassino’s
Politics of Memory’, Early Medieval Europe, x (2001), esp. 343–54.
arrangement and nomenclature dictate how their contents are subsequently

interpreted.138
VII

READING ALONG THE ARCHIVAL GRAIN
Some of the richest and most imaginative medieval and early modern history
published in recent decades is the result of reading texts and archives against
the grain. Carlo Ginzburg brilliantly excavated the mental world of the
Friulian miller Menocchio from the papers of the Inquisition and
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie evocatively recreated the lives of Cathar heretics
in the Pyrennean village of Montaillou from the records compiled by its
enemies.139 Others have investigated how the people who appeared before
civil and ecclesiastical courts deployed the arts of resistance in their encoun-
ters with authority and skilfully manipulated the law for their own object-
ives.140 Natalie Zemon Davis’s study of the stories French men and women
told to try to save themselves from the gallows, Fiction in the Archive, is a
classic of the genre; Lyndal Roper’s sensitive and thought-provoking study of
the psychic struggles and ‘collusive dynamic’ between German witches and
their torturers is another.141 Students of women, slaves and subordinate races
have become particularly adept at reading the gaps and silences in sources
engendered by moral and criminal repression to recover traces of female and
subaltern subjectivity and agency.142 They have shown how administrative
records can be prized open to reveal the voices and actions of the lost peoples
of Europe and the indigenous inhabitants of its empires in this period.
138
See Maria M. Portondo, ‘Finding ‘‘Science’’ in the Archives of the Spanish Monarchy’,
Isis, cvii (2016).
139
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller,
trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (London and Henley, 1980); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, trans. Barbara Bray
(London, 1978).
140
A key inspiration is James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance (New Haven, 1987); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance:
Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1992).
141
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-
Century France (Cambridge, 1987); Lyndal Roper, ‘Witchcraft and Fantasy in Early
Modern Germany’, in Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and
Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), 205; Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror
and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, 2004), esp. ch. 2.
142
An inspiring study of Bermudan female slaves is Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful
Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York, 2014). See also
Yale, ‘The History of Archives’, 348–50.
The Social History of the Archive responds to an emergent methodological

shift best summed up in the anthropologist Ann Stoler’s call for scholars to
read ‘along the archival grain’. Turning traditional approaches on their head,
her work has sought to unravel the internal logic of Dutch colonial records
and to identify the ‘grids of intelligibility’ embedded in them. Her efforts to

write an ‘ethnography’ of this archive, to find its ‘watermark’, and to take its
‘pulse’ have wide resonance and are one source of inspiration for this
volume.143 Others derive from the work of archival scientists: Eric
Ketelaar’s insistence that we must decipher the ‘tacit narratives of power
and knowledge’ and Tom Nesmith’s invocation to see with rather than
through the archive.144 Historians too have offered important models, espe-
cially those who have turned from mining bureaucratic sources towards a
deeper scrutiny of their underlying narrative structures and administrative
conventions. Notable here are John Arnold’s study of the inquisitorial records
of thirteenth-century France as sites of competing discourses that construct a
variety of subjectivities and David Sabean’s discerning analysis of the ‘objecti-
fied narration’ typical of bureaucratic documents and village protocols in
eighteenth-century Wurttemberg.145 Laura Gowing wisely observes that we
must pay full attention to the circumstances of the production of ecclesias-
tical court depositions if we are to make sense of them, while Ann Hughes
approaches the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards’ enormous heresiography,
Gangreana, not as an inherently flawed and unreliable source but as ‘an in-
gredient in the happening’.146
The essays collected here place the media, methods and sites of knowledge-
making about the past and present at the centre of their investigations. They
explore a range of early modern cultures of documentation — feudal, notar-
ial, civic, familial, academic, antiquarian, academic, religious and artistic —
and assess record-keeping in various different contexts — urban and rural,
institutional and personal, official and informal. Focusing on the societies of
Western Europe, they often but not exclusively take the form of case studies,
143
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1, 8, 31, and see 17–53 passim.
144
Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’, 132; Nesmith, ‘Archives from the Bottom Up’.
145
John Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject (Philadelphia,
2001); David Sabean, ‘Peasant Voices and Bureaucratic Texts: Narrative Structure in
Early Modern German Protocols’, in Peter Becker and William Clark (eds.), Little
Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices (Ann
Arbor, 2001).
146
Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London
(Oxford, 1996), 42 and ch. 2 passim; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the
English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 12.
using particular examples as starting points from which to develop arguments

with wider ramifications. They consider why records were created, preserved,
amended and falsified, as well as how and by whom they were referred to,
read, arranged and used. They pay attention to the materiality of the objects
and spaces they study (to parchment and paper, ink and paint, boxes and

buildings) and to the symbolic and non-literate uses of writing.147
Emphasizing process over product, they show that records and archives
have histories, itineraries, biographies and social lives of their own.148
It remains, finally and briefly, to indicate the shape of this Supplement and
to outline some of its overarching themes. The volume is divided into four
sections, though the boundaries between them are porous and fluid. Each of
these has its own implications for our understanding of the records that have
been passed down to posterity. The first set focus on the creation and curation
of archives and the personnel involved in their custody and making. They
illuminate the individuals involved in record-writing and -keeping and the
commercial, professional and seigneurial settings in which it took place, as
well as the circumstances in which archival impulses and consciousness
emerged. Partisan and proprietorial, these processes had an internal motor
and momentum of their own. The spread of professional notaries and arch-
ivists was not merely a response to social need; it was also a consequence of
their own self-serving efforts to make themselves indispensable to prospective
clients, as Marcus Friedrich and Laurie Nussdorfer show. In turn the records
they preserved and generated attest to their entrepreneurship and to the
economy of corruption they had a vested interest in perpetuating. They il-
lustrate how the archive itself can become a source for writing the history of its
keepers, a theme that also emerges from both John Paul Ghobrial and Jennifer
Bishop’s essays. Far from neutral and impersonal texts, administrative re-
cords were a forum within which officials engaged in a form of ‘creative
writing’, amending and fabricating the history of the institutions for which
they worked.
The essays in the second section turn on the interrelated issues of credibil-
ity, testimony, trust and authenticity. They further unsettle the assumptions
about the distinction between bureaucratic and narrative sources we have
147
James M. O’Toole, ‘The Symbolic Significance of Archives’, American Archivist, lvi
(1993).
148
See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1; Nicholas Dirks, ‘Colonial Histories and Native
Informants: Biography of an Archive’, in Carol Buckeridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.),
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia,
1993); Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective (Cambridge, 1986).
inherited from nineteenth-century historians and archival theorists. Frederik

Buylaert and Jelle Haemers investigate the role of records in the construction
and display of social identity, while Jason Scott-Warren interrogates the
complex question of how far they functioned as forms of self-writing. The
other pair assess the particular challenges associated with writing about and

representing acts of divine intervention pictorially, demonstrating how texts
and images functioned as forms of notarized evidence and fostered trust by
mimicking legal formulae. Virginia Reinburg and Mary Laven share with
Liesbeth Corens a concern with articulating the ways in which religious
record-keeping was not isolated from, but implicated in an historical culture
marked by a heightened preoccupation with evidence, proof, and witness.
The third group of essays focuses on practices of collection and compil-
ation and illustrates their role in controlling and organizing knowledge. These
explore how the techniques of chronicling, commonplacing, and transcrip-
tion shaped perception and practice and determined the content and form of
the documentary deposits left to later generations. In different ways they
expand and challenge conventional definitions of the archive. Hannah
Murphy illustrates the symbiotic link between printed and manuscript
books in early modern orders of medical information, while Andy Wood
excavates the traces of ‘the intangible archive’ of oral tradition that survive
in civic histories that gave expression to prevailing hegemonic relations. The
marginalization and silencing of competing narratives is also a theme of
Corens’ piece on the anthologies of documents assembled by the English
Catholic diaspora: these were active attempts to resist the consigning of a
rival history of the Reformation to oblivion. But record-keeping was not
merely or mainly a mechanism for writing about the past; it also helped
people to explain perplexing developments and to organize and preserve
data that could help to predict the future, as Judith Pollmann’s essay
shows. In a context in which the presses were pouring forth books, pamphlets
and periodicals on an unprecedented scale, we may see these archival im-
pulses as methods of managing the problem that there was too much to know.
Picking up a thread that runs throughout this volume, the essays in the last
section of this collection confront the question of record-keeping as a mode
of remembering and forgetting more explicitly. They examine records as
vehicles through which individuals gave expression to emotion and feeling
about traumatic events and consider archives as agents in the formation of
cultural memory. Ann Hughes compels us to look afresh at a class of docu-
ments in the public archive that complicates a top-down story of state for-
mation and allows us access to how humble people made sense of scarring
experiences. Tom Hamilton makes us see a private one through new eyes,
taking its creator out of the footnotes to histories of the French religious wars
and making the ways in which he mediated them the focus of investigation. In
his contribution, Jesse Spohnholz offers a final salutary reminder that we need
to subject to rigorous scrutiny not just individual records and texts but also
the implicit narrative structures enshrined in the repositories in which we
find them. It echoes this volume as a whole in issuing a call for deeper critical

awareness of the ways in which archives quite literally construct the history
that we write. It is to be hoped that this Supplement will serve to provoke
further discussion and debate about the conceptual and methodological
problems that hinder our attempts to reconstruct past societies.
Trinity College, Cambridge Alexandra Walsham

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THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ARCHIVE:

RECORD-KEEPING IN EARLY MODERN

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have provoked us to interrogate ‘one of the chief investigative foundations of

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shape human understanding itself,20 contemporaries also invoked ‘archive’ as

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mid seventeenth-century guide to rhetoric used it to describe the bosom of a

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from the locations of archival activity to its wider ramifications as a cultural

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ancient world has been supplemented by new explorations of ‘archives before

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Knowledge Cultures in Europe, 1400–1900’, Archival Science, x, 3 (2010); Filippo de

and governance also fostered new techniques of record-keeping.35 Similar

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the dissolution of the monasteries in Henrician England both transformed

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key agendas for historians of record-keeping in the adjacent periods. It has

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rich system of political communication in which all levels of citizen, from

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indentures, conveyances and other legal instruments.62 Even the illiterate

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begun to illuminate the visual dimensions of record-keeping itself: the ‘art of

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superstition’, the documents that comprise them bore witness to a partisan

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to impugn the seriousness of their other intellectual endeavours.94 The order

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manuscripts that survive, while the systems of nomenclature and classifica-

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‘a complex ecosystem of imitation and exchange’ that encompassed many

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and record-keeping.111 So too do the books in which women recorded med-

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comparative global history of personal writing that integrates European and

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These impulses often converged with a concern about preserving traces of

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also underpinned by a commitment to empiricism that obscures their status

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arrangement and nomenclature dictate how their contents are subsequently

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