Making Archives in Early Modern Europe
Cambridge University Press, 6/27/2019
EAN 9781108473781, ISBN10: 1108473784
Hardcover, 370 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
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.
Foreword
writing the history of archives
1. Introduction
records, tools and archives in Europe to 1700
2. Archival history
literature and outlook
Part I. The Work of Records (1200– )
3. Probative objects and Scholastic tools in the High Middle Ages
4. A late medieval chancellery and its books
Lisbon, 1460–1560
5. Keeping and organizing information from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century
6. Information management in early modern Innsbruck, 1490–1530
Part II. The Challenges of Accumulation (1400– )
7. The accumulation of records and the evolution of inventories
8. Early modern inventories
Habsburg Austria and Würzburg
9. Classification
the architecture of knowledge and the placement of records
10. The formal logic of classification
topography and taxonomy in Swiss urban records, 1500–1700
Part III. Comprehensive Visions and Differentiating Practices (1550– )
11. Evolving expectations about archives, 1540–1650
12. Registries
tracking the business of governance
Part IV. Rethinking Records and State Archives (1550– )
13. Understanding records
new perspectives and new readings after 1550
14. New disciplines of authenticity and authority
Mabillon's diplomatics and the ius archive
15. Conclusion
the era of chancellery books and beyond.