Archives Information In The Early Modern World

Includes revised version of papers from a conference entitled "Transforming Information: Record Keeping in the Early Modern World" held at the British Academy in April 2014, together with three additional essays.

Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.

The dynamic but little-known story of how archives came to shape and be shaped by European culture and society

Archival Afterlives explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. If early modern natural philosophers claimed all knowledge as their province, theirs was a paper empire. But how and why did naturalists engage with archives, and in particular, with the papers of their dead predecessors? This volume makes a firm case for expanding what counts as scientific labour, integrating scribes, archivist, library keepers, editors, and friends and family of deceased naturalists into the history of science. It shows how early modern natural philosophers pursued new natural knowledge in dialogue with their recent material past. Finally, it demonstrates the sustaining importance of archival institutions in the growth and development of the “New Sciences.” Contributors are: Arnold Hunt, Michael Hunter, Vera Keller, Carol Pal, Anna Marie Roos, Richard Serjeantson, Victoria Sloyan, Alison Walker, and Elizabeth Yale.

The Birth of the Archive traces the history of archives from their emergence in the Late Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period, and vividly shows how archives permeated and fundamentally changed European culture. Archives were compiled and maintained by peasants and kings, merchants and churchmen, and conceptions of archives were as diverse as those who used them. The complex, demanding job of the archivist was just as variable: archivists might serve as custodians, record-keepers, librarians, legal experts, historians, scholars, researchers, public officials, or some combination thereof; navigating archives was often far from straightforward. The shift of archival storage from haphazard collections of papers to the methodically organized institutionalized holdings of the nineteenth century was a gradual, nonlinear process. Friedrich provides an essential background to the history of archives over the centuries and enriches the story of their evolution with chapters on key sociocultural aspects of European archival culture. He discusses their meaning and symbolism in European thought, early modern conceptions of the archive’s function, and questions of access and usability. Exploring the close, often vexed relationship between archives and political power, Friedrich illustrates the vulnerability of archives to political upheaval and war. He concludes with an introspective look at how historians used their knowledge of and work with archives to create distinct representations of themselves and their craft. The Birth of the Archive engages with scholarship in political history, the history of mentalities, conceptions of space, historiography, and the history of everyday life in early modern Europe. It has much to offer for specialists and scholars, while the jargon-free prose of this translation is also accessible to the general reader.

"This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but also as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of signifi cant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. Focusing attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800, the contributors to this volume place the processes by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes, analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, and evaluate the role of textual, pictorial, material and fi nancial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical defi nitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the politics of everyday life. They also illuminate the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to oblivion."--

What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, ‘knowledges in the plural’) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history. Leading cultural historian, Peter Burke, draws upon examples of this new kind of history from different periods and from the history of India, East Asia and the Islamic world as well as from Europe and the Americas. He discusses some of the main concepts used by scholars working in the field, among them ‘order of knowledge’, ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘knowledge society’. This book tells the story of the transformation of relatively raw ‘information’ into knowledge via processes of classification, verification and so on, the dissemination of this knowledge and finally its employment for different purposes, by governments, corporations or private individuals. A concluding chapter identifies central problems in the history of knowledge, from triumphalism to relativism, together with attempts to solve them. The only book of its kind yet to be published, What is the History of Knowledge? will be essential reading for all students of history and the humanities in general, as well as the interested general reader.

This provocative new history of early modern Europe argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. These developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life. The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters. Engaging with historical questions across many fields of human activity, Paul M. Dover interprets the historical significance of this 'information revolution' for the present day, and suggests thought-provoking parallels with the informational challenges of the digital age.

European states were overwhelmed with information around 1500. Their agents sought to organize their overflowing archives to provide trustworthy evidence and comprehensive knowledge that was useful in the everyday exercise of power. This detailed comparative study explores cases from Lisbon to Vienna to Berlin in order to understand how changing information technologies and ambitious programs of state-building challenged record-keepers to find new ways to organize and access the information in their archives. From the intriguing details of how clerks invented new ways to index and catalog the expanding world to the evolution of new perspectives on knowledge and power among philologists and historians, this book provides illuminating vignettes and revealing comparisons about a core technology of governance in early modern Europe. Enhanced by perspectives from the history of knowledge and from archival science, this wide-ranging study explores the potential and the limitations of knowledge management as media technologies evolved.

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).