Abstract
While recordkeeping and record-using were important in Classical societies and early medieval Europe, rapid evolution and change characterized recordkeeping practices from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern period. This paper recasts changes in Western European recordkeeping from the fourteenth to eighteenth century in terms of the differentiation of spaces and practices, thus challenging older literature that sees increasing accumulation around a foundational archivum as the primary mode of expansion. Empirically, the argument concentrates on developments in the German lands that produced highly sophisticated Registratur (practices that tracked and indexed a wide variety of circulating records) across the German sphere after 1400. As first argued by Ernst Pitz, early modern German archivists began differentiating conceptual and physical spaces for recordkeeping in the fifteenth century, thus producing both archives of charters and registries of informational records of many kinds. A close examination of developments in Habsburg Innsbruck confirms that both an ordered archive and a powerful comprehensive system of registry emerged simultaneously in the 1520s in one of the most sophisticated recordkeeping venues of the era. The paper also reconsiders the historiography of archives, emphasizing how the cultural, medial and spatial turns have transformed current research. By contrasting relatively stable medial forms – pen, ink and paper; roll, bundle and codex – with more dynamic and transformative medial configurations which can be studied through the systematic comparison of specific cases, I argue that new research on archival history offers fresh and less culturally bound approaches to the preservation of records in the archives that remain the foundation for historical research into the past.
Als habe ich gegenwärtige dispositionem Registraturae, sive veterum actorum ad nostra collationem & applicationem, bey übriger Weyl einfältig entwerffen / und kürtzlichen an Hand geben wollen / wie man allen Schrifften und Handlungen / mit Fleiß und sonderbarem Nachdenken durchsehen / den Kern und Safft mit wenigem begreifen / und den underschiedenen wichtigen Innhalt / in seine gehörige Bücher methodicè abtheilen und verfassen müsse … [I have sought in my available time to insightfully develop and succinctly present the current disposition of our registry, or the old records for our collation and use, and how one may review all documents and dossiers with diligence and particular insight, how one may comprehend their core and essence with little effort, and how one may divide and compose their diverse and important content into the proper books …] Georg Aebbtlin, Anführung zu der Registratur-Kunst (1669), p. [v]
In the Middle Ages, according to this view, various institutions had primarily collected legally valuable proofs, which they kept in treasuries that by the fifteenth century were known as archivi. The growing production of additional genres of records, as well as lords’ and magistrates’ growing interest in more comprehensive information about their subjects and domains, spurred the formation of additional masses of records, in the form either of gathered loose papers or (very importantly) of books. By the seventeenth century, an archivist’s duty was to ‘divide and compose’ all kinds of written material in a dominion's possession according to a hierarchy of value that started with probative documents in the archivum, but which also extended to a vast range of other records. Both contemporaries in German-speaking Europe and modern German archival science capture this expanded activity under the term Registratur.
The new science of diplomatics, originating with Jean Mabillon in the late seventeenth century and culminating with Harry Bresslau in the early twentieth century, added much detail to this understanding of how Germanic Registratur and its parallels across Europe unfolded in the armoires, vaults and treasure chests of European rulers, but without rattling the basic narrative stretching from medieval archivi to governmental archives around 1900. Twentieth-century archival history refined the periodization and distinguished regional variations of registry's emergence, and eventually began connecting patterns of recordkeeping to larger shifts in politics and culture – but still relied on a model in which the archivum remained both the highly valued core and the genealogical nucleus of larger assemblages of records. In Robert-Henri Bautier's influential 1968 essay on ‘La phase cruciale de l’histoire des archives’, for example, he defined four major periods: the palace archives of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (now almost all lost); the treasure-chests of medieval charter recipients; the arsenals of state authority that diligent clerks like Aebbtlin built through the art of registry; and the historians’ laboratory that archives had become after the French Revolution. 3 Like most of the scholarship since Mabillon, Bautier's model privileges the state at every step (including when historians entered the picture as the authors of national history and identity) and remains thoroughly functionalistic in its approach to records, repositories and information. Additionally, Bautier reiterates the view that the transition from treasuries to arsenals, in particular, was a largely additive process, driven by the accumulation of new kinds of materials that were the product of intensified administration.
In the following essay, I propose to revise this narrative in light of the last generation's research by medievalists and early modern historians into the history of European archives. Without rattling the empirical contributions of earlier scholarship, I will recast the early modern segment of archival history as a complex process of differentiation among spaces, materials and practices – differentiation arising from changes in statecraft, to be sure, but also reflecting the evolution of political dominion understood as a culturally embedded and discursively practiced phenomenon that transformed both the production and consumption of records. To illustrate how such dynamic differentiation took place, I will present evidence drawn from the well-preserved archival tradition in Innsbruck, Austria.
In viewing early modern archival change in terms of differentiation, I build primarily on studies published since the 1980s, when archival scientists received (or thoughtfully rejected) important insights from critical theory, 4 and when medievalists in particular began thinking more deeply about the historical processes that had produced the archives in which they did their work, and about the semiotic processes that had taken place around earlier repositories over time. 5 An additional powerful impulse to rethink archives as historical phenomena came from scholars as well as activists working in contexts where the existing archives were highly problematic. Historians looking for subaltern subjects (women, colonial subjects, heretics and other oppressed groups) that were often silenced or absent in older archives have encountered and learned from communities separated from the sources of their own past (for example, lesbians and gay men from the 1970s onwards, or island communities that had passed under multiple distant colonial masters) who sought to build their own archives to secure their memory and identity. 6
These impulses resonated in the work of historians and archival scientists who started working on the history of archives in the 1990s, in parallel with three broader developments, generally characterized as distinct ‘turns’ that were emerging within the humanities in the same decade. Most broadly, archival history gained tremendous impetus from the cultural turn, a movement that was increasingly directing historians’ attention to practices, as a way of moving beyond the structures and functions that had been the primary focus of earlier methodologies. More specifically, the so-called spatial and the material turns – which themselves can be viewed as reflecting the maturation of cultural history as the predominant register for contemporary historiography – opened new ways to think about archives, which scholars increasingly recognized as emphatically both spatial and material.
Each of these turns was well suited to the historical analysis of archives. The cultural turn allowed scholars to view specific archives as sites where ongoing practices of writing, ordering and destroying records transformed archives' contents over time – and thus historians' possibilities for later research as well. When applied to archives, the spatial turn served to accentuate how archives functioned as assemblages of objects deployed in physically and architecturally defined spaces in a more-or-less ordered way. Additionally, spatial thinking helps us see how more abstract principles of ordering (e.g. by subject, by date, by ruler), through their application to dispersed physical documents, created metaphorical or conceptual spaces within archival repositories. The material turn, finally, brought to the fore the many ways in which documents as material objects (rather than as disembodied texts) entered political and cultural contestation, while also recognizing that early modern archivists had to deal not only with the preservation and delivery of texts, but with fire, damp, insects and mice, not to mention security, cabinetmaking and the circulation of the material objects in their care. 7
A first summation of historians’ recent efforts to re-envision the history of early modern European archives appears in Markus Friedrich's study, Die Geburt des Archivs. 8 Friedrich provides an invaluable survey of how historians have interrogated archives as historical phenomena, looking at everything from writing practices to furniture. His critique of earlier periodizations of change in the archives, including Bautier's, problematizes the continuity of perspective found in the older work, although his title evoking ‘the birth of the archive’ still echoes Bautier's conclusions about the ‘naissance de l’archivistique’ in the burgeoning administrative collections of early modern Europe. Also significant is Francis X. Blouin and William Rosenberg's book-length essay on the tensions between archival and historical understandings of authority. 9 Blouin and Rosenberg concentrate on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without addressing the medieval and early modern periods. Nevertheless, their study helps clarify – especially to historians – recent differentiations in form, function and practice that help define Western archivality as a product of earlier historical developments, just as it stands on the eve of a new, largely digital transformation.
Differentiating Recordkeeping in Early Modern Europe
A fundamental feature of recent scholarship on archives is its dialectical rather than functionalist approach. Rather than assuming the continuity of terminology and methods, newer work emphasizes how document production, circulation or use could create, transform, or even erase repositories over time. Even if archival scholars rejected the way Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida had appropriated the term ‘archive’ for their philosophical arguments, they appreciated that archival practices simultaneously constituted, and were constituted by, burgeoning accumulations and changing expectations about the meaning of stored records.
10
Already in 1959, however, a path-breaking study by Ernst Pitz laid out very lucidly how in the late Middle Ages, archival treasuries and administrative arsenals of records emerged simultaneously out of earlier undifferentiated practices, each conditioning the other.
11
To understand the power of Pitz's insight, let us first look to his predecessor Aebbtlin's definition and understanding of the archivum (the treasury of privileges and probative documents) as one vital part of a larger recordkeeping system: The archivum is the first body of a registry [Registratur], and because of its value and worth the most precious and important / from which the other two bodies take their origin, and should build upon.
12
After studying chancellery practice in three late medieval German cities, however, Pitz concluded that the origin of the archivum was in fact quite different. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, he noted, increasingly sessile collections of ‘all sorts of records’ (that is, not only sealed charters) eventually occupied a chest or other container (Schrein) in each city: In these containers other files [Akten] also found a place at first, in the form of the single codex [Stadtbuch] that served for all matters. But as soon as the Schrein gained a permanent location, and the Stadtbuch evolved into multiple volumes, the storage of files became separated. A pure archive of charters remained behind for those documents that did not count as files, exactly because of their function.
13
Pitz's seemingly dry technical point establishes two powerful and insightful claims. First, rather than founding other archival spaces, archives of original charters – at least in these cities – were distilled out of older collections that had always been heterogeneous. Second, it was not a priori valuations that led to the differentiation of archival spaces containing different genres of record, but rather the practices of secretaries, copyists and urban leaders. Increasingly differentiated archival spaces, in turn, supported increasingly separate uses of the records involved. The new perspective suggested in Pitz's work has been strengthened by more recent research. Notably, medieval specialists have shown how complex the use of documents was in periods as far back as Late Antiquity: forensic authority in the course of legal disputes was never the only, and often not even the most significant way that documents could be used. Rather, we need to consider medieval writing, including the writing of the charters and legal documents that were likely to find their way into archives, in its performative, political and cultural contexts. 14 Thomas Hildbrand, for example, takes a wider view of the life history of records by examining one small institution, the cloister of Allerheiligen near Schaffhausen, Switzerland, over the longue durée. His analysis shows how all records underwent de-semiosis upon entering repositories, and gained new meanings through processes of re-semiosis, shaped by their new contexts of deployment, when taken out. The Allerheiligen archive was not the lockbox for legal texts that traditional diplomatics had imagined, but rather a mutable site in which documents underwent cataclysmic changes in meaning, often repeatedly, as the society around them changed. 15 Such scholars thus provide meticulous empirical demonstrations that support the theoretical distrust in the possibility of originary records found (among other concerns) in Jacques Derrida's essay on Archive Fever. 16
Authors such as Aebbtlin, therefore, described not fundamental verities about archiving, but a particular configuration of archival spaces and practices typical for central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His assessments about which documents were ‘precious and important’ provide testimony about one particular situation, but we should neither generalize them across early modern Europe – which, as Friedrich shows, was remarkably heterogeneous in its archival methods – nor trust Aebbtlin's own intuitions about how recordkeeping operated in earlier periods. Pitz's work reveals that such assumptions would be incorrect. But can we see other cases of differentiation similar to those described in Pitz's work? A close look at Innsbruck after 1500 demonstrates that we can.
Differentiation in Practice and Space in Innsbruck around 1500
The alpine city of Innsbruck already had a long tradition as an administrative centre for the High Medieval county of Tirol when it became the seat of Habsburg governance with the accession of Maximilian I as King of the Romans in 1486. The city's further development as a keystone of Habsburg finance and administration under Maximilian and his successors Charles V and Ferdinand I differed in almost every way from the North German cities studied by Pitz, making it particularly noteworthy that a process of archival differentiation with many similar features (though on a larger scale) emerged there over the generation from the 1510s to the 1540s. During this period, Habsburg chancellery servants began generating impressive and increasingly complex systems of book-form registry on the one hand, and, on the other, began distilling the disordered and heterogeneous mass of documents scattered around the city's offices and basements into an ordered Schatzgewölbe (treasure vault) with impressive finding tools. Each of these developments built upon strong existing traditions reaching back centuries in Innsbruck, particularly in Tyrolean fiscal administration, but each was also transformative and utterly novel in its scope and ambition to render the Habsburg monarchy's complex skein of territories knowable and its privileges enforceable. 17
When Maximilian deposed his cousin Sigismund in Innsbruck in 1490, the records of the Innsbruck chancelleries were in disarray. The formation of a new archival system in Innsbruck gained a first push with the Imperial chancellery reforms negotiated in 1495, which brought renewed attention to the state of Imperial and family recordkeeping among the divided and fractious Habsburgs. Although Maximilian proved a savvy negotiator over the operation of the reorganized Imperial chancellery (nominally headed by the Archbishop of Mainz, but largely working as an itinerant team accompanying the current emperor), his efforts to improve recordkeeping in Innsbruck caused as much disruption as improvement. In 1505, the Habsburgs in Innsbruck also inherited extensive territories and an archive from the Counts of Görz which arrived in Innsbruck and sat largely untouched for a decade. Only with the accession of Charles V in 1519 were systematic efforts undertaken to manage the flow of information between the itinerant emperors and their regional administrators. Innsbruck, Vienna, Graz and later Prague became focal points, each developing or applying new techniques while also exchanging material in order to ensure that the right information was accessible in the right place when needed. 18
The critical moment came in the early 1520s, when two separate projects began to bring order to the records kept by the Innsbruck Hofkanzlei, that is, the chancellery directly serving the Emperor and his brother, Archduke Ferdinand. 19 The two projects echo the differentiation that Ernst Pitz observed a century earlier in north German cities. For the first, chancellery staff reporting to Ferdinand established a novel system of copybooks that tracked Innsbruck correspondence both to and from the Habsburg family, as well as correspondence to and from the territories reporting to Innsbruck. Documents were divided by source and pertinence, copied in chronological order into massive volumes, and alphabetically indexed. These books, whose production and use continued for over a century, provided the same services to the Habsburgs that a Stadtbuch of the kind discussed by Pitz provided for many German cities, in that it memorialized not only decisions, but also deliberations and correspondence.
In a second initiative, one of Registrators working in the Hofkanzlei, Wilhelm Putsch, began to arrange and catalog the existing documents found in various Innsbruck storerooms. Most of this material consisted of charters, privileges and other probative material that formed an Innsbruck archive, although gathered haphazardly in various spaces, and lacking in finding aids. 20 Putsch's reorganization and inventory created a new institution, the Innsbruck Schatzarchiv – that is, a treasury, or as Aebbtlin would call it, an archivum – for the Habsburg regime. 21 Putsch also composed a five-volume catalogue for Innsbruck that captured the new collection's arrangement, with a sophisticated alphabetical index in a separate sixth volume. These two projects, which completely transformed recordkeeping in Innsbruck, shared important similarities in terms of practice, spatiality and material form, even as they differentiated records in new ways.
The essence of early modern registry practices lay in tracking the flow of documents related to a certain area of governance, something that was not in itself new in the 1520s. Florence began keeping copies of its outgoing political correspondence in 1395, for example, while the Milanese chancellery of Francesco Sforza systematized and expanded its missive-books in the 1460s. 22 Bern began copying incoming letters shortly after 1400, and outgoing letters after 1442. 23 When the resources of a major power like the Habsburg dynasty became available for such enterprises, with extensive and trained staff supported by substantial revenue, these recognized methods could also expand into novel comprehensive systems of records, as they did in Innsbruck.
The key innovation of the Innsbruck system lay in the institution of copybooks compiled by specific officers and separated into series pertaining to different substantive areas of princely interest. Through these volumes, as will be detailed below, the Hofkanzlei created an information system that linked circulating documents (both from outside and within the administrative system) to specific copybooks, using chronological order as one structural principle while providing well-designed indexes to allow effective searching. Various pieces of the system can be traced back to earlier practices, as far back as the fiscal management system of the medieval chancellery, but the fully developed Innsbruck system emerged all at once in 1523, both separate and very different from Putsch's contemporaneous work on older records.
The first copybook from the series Von der Fürstlichen Durchlaucht (‘From his Princely Highness’) covers the years 1523 to 1526, and serves to illustrate the system's architecture. 24 A number of clues indicate that the volume was first bound only after most of the writing had been done, at which time its index, which takes up the first 44 leaves on visibly different paper, was cut to match. 25 The volume's contents consist of verbatim copies of instructions, correspondence and other guidance received from archduke Ferdinand, wherever he was; it is not clear whether the originals of these records were preserved after they had been copied. In this and subsequent volumes, multiple hands appear, often varying from entry to entry. This suggests that entries were made on a regular basis as business came in or went out. Entries range from a few lines to multiple pages in length, and generally average about four to five per page. A rough calculation therefore suggests that the entire volume contains some 2000 entries over four years, or an average of nearly two per day. A parallel series of nearly identical copybooks entitled An der fürstlichen Durchlaucht (‘To his princely Highness’) contains copies of correspondence from the Innsbruck council and administration to Ferdinand.
To make entries accessible, the scribes organized the spaces within the volume using various mise-en-livre and mise-en-page techniques. The chronological order of entries provided one fundamental ordering principle that extended across pages, although minor deviations appear. Structuring the book's space this way made it possible to search for something if a chancellery official knew roughly when the matter had been under discussion. In addition, some of the volumes, particularly early on, had page breaks or large headings to identify months within each year. 26 Within the chronological framework of each entire codex, various mise-en-page features supported finding particular entries. Entries took block form in a single column, with clear spaces between them, and with the sender or recipient and the date given at the beginning or end of each entry. To further ease browsing, each entry had a bold headword or phrase in larger script; inside the entries, large script and thicker strokes also highlighted individual words, such as the names of the persons, towns or domains involved. These highlighted keywords allowed a user to leaf through the book (already oriented by the series designation and the date) to find specific targets. Headings and in-text keywords were regularly augmented by additional keywords in the margin, which appear to have been entered during the indexing process by a different scribe. Thus, two professionals had a chance to provide each entry with keywords for future searches, especially since some (but by no means all) keywords were represented in the volume indexes.
The individual volumes of Innsbruck chancellery copybooks were impressive demonstrations of secretarial skill, but their place as part of a larger system was even more important. The copybooks begun in 1523 formed a comprehensive network that tracked queries, decisions and instructions travelling into and out of the archducal chancellery. This system allowed the chancellery to function as a communicative hub. One axis of communication ran from Innsbruck to the archduke (and later King and Emperor) Ferdinand I, wherever he might be, tracking exchanges on a variety of topics in two parallel series. A third series launched in 1523, Causae Domini (CD), contained copies of the correspondence that the governing council, their secretaries and the chancellery sent to other Innsbruck offices. An additional eight series of copybooks, all launched the same year, copied outgoing correspondence to the regional subdivisions under the Innsbruck administration.
The Innsbruck copybooks reorganized existing methods in order to manage documents coming in and out of the Innsbruck Hofkanzlei: most of the separate practices, spaces and material technologies that they deployed had long been in use, though not always combined in this way. Spatially, the complex mise-en-page found in the copybooks resembled that found in codexes and pages that dated back to the High Middle Ages. 27 Materially, neither ink, paper, nor the formation of pages into quires, bundles, and codexes were innovative in themselves. Nevertheless, the genesis of the copybooks – parallel to the genesis of an ordered archive for the Innsbruck regime, as we shall see – gave Habsburg administrators and the princes they served powerful new ways to respond to political challenges and to exert power.
A parallel and simultaneous campaign in Innsbruck to arrange and catalogue the dynasty's old charters rested on the work of Wilhelm Putsch, a master organizer who served the Habsburgs first in Innsbruck and later in Vienna and beyond. 28 His first major project, begun around 1518, was a one-volume inventory of the Görz papers that had arrived in Innsbruck around 1505. 29 The methods he pioneered in that project became the foundation for his later projects, each of which established order not by re-shuffling the diverse materials, but rather through the production of an inventory that mirrored the materials' disposition in the physical space of the repository, together with an index that provided an alternate view driven by keywords of interest to its author. Like the creators of the copybooks, Putsch thus drew on the rich possibilities that the codex offered as a machine for organizing knowledge as he approached his task.
Mirroring a collection's disposition in a book was a decisive feature in all of Putsch's work, as it was in many other contemporary inventories. This principle built on older forms, as laid out with particular clarity in a 1422 copy of an older Habsburg inventory: In this book, all the documents that our lordship of Austria has in the fortress at Baden are marked under a.b.c. … And a document one finds marked with an a lies in the box that has an a on it, and the letters one finds listed under b one finds also in the box that has b on it, and so as under a.b.c. on and on and marked with the other signs that are found afterwards, in the same way.
30
In Putsch's Görz inventory, a leaf bound into the middle of the inventory volume (around page 80) summarized the arrangement of the material in the repository and in the book on a single sheet. The collection was divided into 53 sections that corresponded to particular spaces within the archive, but which were equally categories of inquiry, since previous secretaries had gathered documents together in relation to their contents. Such gathering of loose material could emerge intentionally through reorganization, but also organically through the practices of chancellery staff, who tended to put papers that they viewed as related in the same physical place. In either case, the resulting association of spaces with ideas created what Peter Rück defined as an ideal-topographical arrangement, that is, one in which a system of categories was reflected in the physical arrangement of records. 31
Putsch also provided an alphabetical index to his Görz inventory and to all of his subsequent inventories, using sophisticated indexing methods already available in Innsbruck. In contrast to inventories that mirror the placement of documentary objects, indexes are driven by keywords arranged in some prior sequence, such as the letters of the alphabet. Putsch may have chosen to take on the challenge of creating an index of the new Schatzgewölbe collection because of the large quantity and haphazard arrangement of the material there, which derived from multiple sources and had been gathered by multiple chancelleries over centuries. In such a situation, implicit ideal-topographical principles were not sufficient to gain access to the treasures Putsch and his masters believed were there. For the Görz inventory, Putsch had used 48 leaves of paper for his index, on which he first inscribed two- or three-letter combinations in alphabetical order, before beginning to enter references to documents in the inventory. 32 For the Schatzgewölbe, he created an entire additional volume that indexed his five-volume inventory. 33
Putsch's larger project to create an inventory for the material now centralized in the Innsbruck Schatzgewölbe began in the mid-1520s, around when he was finishing the Görz inventory. Although comprising much more material, his new project relied on the same combination of comprehensive mirroring and indexing of the vast range of records found in the vaults, which Putsch transformed into an organized collection henceforth known as the Schatzarchiv. His approach thus resonated with the system of copybooks emerging in Innsbruck at the same time, which created an organized collection out of multiple streams of correspondence and reports. Putsch's Innsbruck inventory to the Schatzgewölbe identified documents according to genres, including ‘letter, receipt, verdict, authorization, permission, compromise, assignment, contract, missive, instrument, authenticated copy (Vidimus), ratification’ and more, all listed in a sequence that mirrored their placement in the five armoires that held the newly gathered collection. 34 This collection was clearly archival (in both an early modern and modern sense), because it was separately enclosed far from the actual chancellery, and also because it contained older material of interest primarily for occasional reference rather than current consultation. Between the novel system of copybooks that Putsch's colleagues in the chancellery were inventing and the simultaneous cataloguing of the Schatzgewölbe by Putch himself, developments in Innsbruck thus represented a differentiation of documentary practice, parallel to the description that Pitz provided of German urban Stadtbücher diverging from the cities’ archivi, with the boundaries of one new organizing system, the registry, helping to define the functions of another, the archive.
The mirroring between physical space and inventory space was remarkably systematic in Putsch's inventory to the Innsbruck Schatzarchiv, in which the arrangement of boxes and the layout of the inventory were layered and hierarchical in close parallel.
35
The space in the vaults was arranged by furniture consisting of cases (Kasten) and boxes (Laden), with 227 sequentially numbered boxes. Into these labelled spaces, documents were distributed in a varying number of major categories. Some categories took several boxes, others shared a box with others, depending on the extent of the material involved.
36
The close correspondence between inventory volumes and collection was amplified by the armoires in the Schatzgewölbe: the five volumes of the inventory corresponded exactly with the five armoires holding boxes with documents, which also corresponded (though very imperfectly) with five main genres of document.
37
This one-to-one homology was emphasized by the use of color in the inventories' bindings, as Putsch described it in the introduction to his index volume: Table of contents for the five books, in which are summarily registered the documents and writings of the house of Austria, which lie in Innsbruck in the upper document vaults behind the women's chambers in five armoires [cästen]; and each armoire has its own particular book: namely for the first armoire, the first book bound in black; for the second armoire, the second book bound in white; for the third armoire, the third book bound in red; for the fourth armoire, the fourth book bound in yellow; and for the fifth armoire, the fifth book bound in green, and every leaf of these five aforementioned books has two numbers, one on each side.
38
Note: the red numbers in the margins of the five books mean the numbers of the boxes of the five cases in the vault, in which the same documents lie, and these boxes are in all 227.
39
The consistency of homologies between collection and inventory, sustained by the parallel articulation of the repository's space and the inventory's pages, allows us to understand the inventory and index in Innsbruck as a mechanism for connecting a system of substantive categories to a system of spaces in a way that eased the search for actual documents in the collection. Physical spaces were represented by separate codices or their sections, by the color-coding and numbering of volumes and cases, and by the serial numbering of boxes within the cases. Onto this articulated terrain, Putsch mapped conceptual space based on content or pertinence, which also shaped both the inventory and the physical arrangement of documents, by dividing the armoires into a sequence of physical spaces (consisting of part of one box, a whole box, or several boxes) of appropriate sizes that corresponded to particular conceptual spaces, defined by categories emerging from the Habsburgs' rule, and visible as spaces on the pages of the inventory. Within both conceptual spaces and boxes, another ordering principle – chronology – provided further order, completing the hierarchy downwards to the level of the individual document.
The architecture of this system became visible to the inventories' users through a series of textual and mise-en-page technologies that Putsch and his colleagues deployed. These techniques connected documents, inventory and index by providing identifiable signs, such as dates and keywords, that linked the separate parts. For the Innsbruck Schatzgewölbe, for example, Putsch and his assistants added three notes to the dorsal side of each document they inventoried: one listed the keywords under which it would be indexed, the second gave the year, and the third gave the number of the box in which it was stored. Significantly, the volume and page of the inventory that recorded a document were added later, as well. Even viewed in isolation, therefore, each actual document already contained multiple pointers to its box and chronological position in archival space (which corresponded to its location in the conceptual space of the inventory), as well as to the index that made it findable. 40
Additional mise-en-page techniques further emphasized this system of correspondences. In the left margin of each document's summary in the inventory, Putsch copied the most important keywords in a highly visible position that made browsing easier. The box numbers were added in color, and placed in the left margin as well. The right margin was reserved for the years each document covered: this was necessary because, although the overall arrangement (at least on Putsch's part, before the very substantial interpolations in other hands) was roughly chronological, there were many disparities, meaning that quick access to the year of each document was helpful for browsing as well.
Viewing Putsch's impressive work from the three linked perspectives of secretarial practices, physical and conceptual spaces, and the materiality of their disposition (whether on loose leaves in the Schatzarchiv or bound into codices in the chancellery), provides rich insight into how a rich differentiation of archival spaces could take place over just a few years. Both copybooks and Schatzarchiv deployed existing techniques and tools, but on an unprecedented scale that suited the material involved, the ways in which the chancellery expected it to be consulted, and the available resources. Given the complexity of the composite Habsburg state, it is no surprise that it does not conform to the conventional narrative (discussed above) of an originary archivum supplemented by a body of letters and other records. 41 Rather, looking at the Innsbruck case shows how the intensification of Habsburg administration in multiple ways after 1500 spurred the sophisticated articulation of distinct repositories for different material, each dependent on particular cultural and legal expectations about written records, and all drawing on the well-established and relatively stable technologies of the pen, the leaf and the book.
Early Modern Archives: Configurations of Practices, Spaces, and Materials
The discussion above suggests that older periodizations and characterizations of the cultural processes that produced Western Europe's abundant and complex archives are not adequate. In particular, rather than the originary archive-treasury imagined as Europe's oldest and most authentic recordkeeping form, the materials, spaces and practices gathered under the term ‘archive’ at different times seem to have been fluid and dynamic, arising from rather than underlying the diverse methods used for specialized recordkeeping. Indeed, one flaw in older typologies such as Bautier's may lie in their attempt to define archives as a single phenomenon across eras. To put it differently, while the terminology of archive, charter, file and register does indeed have medieval and early modern roots, retrospectively projecting the definitions polished by nineteenth-century diplomatics onto the unstable referents of earlier times is likely to cause confusion. Perhaps what we need instead is a new approach to understanding different modes of organizing records in particular periods – an approach that analyses them through the medial and governmental processes that constituted them, and that they helped constitute.
In the remainder of this essay, I will therefore try to re-cast European archival developments in terms of historically specific and temporally unstable medial configurations that build on underlying, relatively stable medial forms such as the book, the seal and signature, the armoire, and so forth, which can be found across various periods, and indeed, across various civilizations from Antiquity to the present. 42 The benefit of this distinction will be a clearer understanding of European archives without privileging certain terms and assumptions that emerged in the nineteenth century. An early reflection on these issues appears in Ernst Posner's classic analysis of the Archives in the Ancient World. In the opening chapter of this foundational study, Posner directly addressed a critical question: ‘A book on the history of ancient archives’, he wrote, ‘must justify its existence,’ by which he meant establishing that the things he included were in fact archives. 43 Posner responded to this imperative with a move that we must both respect and critique: he asserted that ‘we find [in the ancient world] already those basic types of records that may be called constants in record creation…’. 44 He then defines these constants in terms that manifestly derive from the archival science of his (Prussian) background: laws of the land, ‘records of past administrative action’, records securing income, ‘notarial’ records, and so forth.
Posner's desire to capture underlying commonalities was sound, but clearly needs critical review. Rather than reifying Prussian expectations, we can draw on the cultural history of archives and the broader framework of cultural history to suggest that the underlying phenomena that connect archival practices across time lie at a different level of analysis. It was not just notaries and treasurers, but more generally the technologies and the media available to preserve memories for the purpose of exercising power that created the framework within which categories such as the document, the record and the archive could emerge. Any particular collection reflected the medial forms available to particular actors at a specific time, and was embodied in changing configurations of these forms. Let us consider forms and configurations in turn.
All recordkeeping depends on, and is thus shaped by, the available medial forms. In late medieval and early modern Europe, these included parchment, paper, ink, boxes, sacks, codices, rolls, seals, and so forth. But while medial forms shape and constrain record-making and recordkeeping within a given cultural tradition, they do not provide differentiating features when looking at archives within a single tradition at a given time, since they tend to be widely shared, and changes in their use tend to diffuse rapidly. For example, a tradition in which the medial form of hanging seals is given great weight will not generally result in tight bundling of documents – you can't bundle the seals! – but this constraint will operate throughout the historical environment in which hanging seals are prevalent, rather than differentiating cases within that environment. In Europe, the hanging seal was most prevalent in the high and late Middle Ages, leading to the widespread emergence of archival spaces consisting of chests or drawers, in which documents could be laid loose. Changes in medial forms enabled changes in archival organization. When non-sealed records began taking on greater salience in Europe after the fourteenth century, for example, the fact that these could be bundled tightly with string or copied into books led to a shift in prevalent medial configurations found in repositories and in inventories, leaving behind the awkward sealed originals as a differentiated subgroup rather than as the core form of stored record.
In contrast to medial forms, which represented a common resource in any historical moment, it is therefore medial configurations at various levels of abstraction that are critical to understanding the differences in how records have been stored and organized. Medial configurations might include, for example: specific practices of mise-en-page and mise-en-livre, which defined how a codex could be deployed within an archive; or else the specific practices of gathering documents into groups, such as Konvolute, liasses, legajos and other forms of non-codical gathering; and so forth. In contrast to underlying medial forms, such configurations, as I have found in my ongoing research, display considerable heterogeneity across early modern Europe, and thus provide useful comparative tools for differentiating cases and for understanding the practices in play within a given case. 45
Medial forms underlying European archives.
The medial forms in Table 1 appear ubiquitously across Europe after about 1200, with many variations that reflect specific micro-practices in use at particular moments. Often, such micro-practices then remained fossilized within collections – such as in the stitching of documents into a roll or in the sewing of particular material into quires – even as new practices came to shape the production of new archival material. These forms, however, have limited utility in explaining the way in which a particular collection evolved, and how its spaces and methods were diverging – internally or from other cases – at any particular historical moment.
Archival configurations in the European tradition.
Configurations exist at multiple levels of abstraction and are usually highly contingent, flexible and dynamic. For example, the decision in 1520s Innsbruck to collect and chronologically organize correspondence into multiple series of codices, like the decision to create codex-based inventories that guided officials to documents preserved in the Schatzarchiv, relied on the underlying medial form of the codex, but created new configurations of mise-en-page and mise-en-livre to make information accessible. Like the differentiation of the archive from the Stadtbuch explored by Pitz, the Innsbruck developments thus represent changes in configuration, for the most part. Such changes are promising objects of historical analysis because they allow us to distinguish each particular situation from the next.
Both forms and configurations remain deeply dependent on how a given society understands the relationships between writing, memory and power. The way in which official actors collected records rested upon their understandings of human communication, human obligation, and the reproduction of a culture through time. Clay tablets and inscriptions on stone generated different approaches than did parchment, paper, or thumbnail drives. But equally, recordkeeping in societies using paper and ink can still vary profoundly, as even a brief comparison of Chinese, Islamic and European modes of keeping (or not keeping) various records demonstrates.
Treating specific repositories as cases, each resting on relatively stable medial forms and displaying fluid medial configurations, can help us understand each repository's characteristics in comparison to others, near and far, and help us reflect on what we should look for when asking how records were deployed in the past, and how historians should approach them in the present. For example, studies are urgently needed that investigate how records in Europe were produced, displayed, or deployed at specific moments (performatively, by close scrutiny, orally, in copies or originals?). How was responsibility for producing, keeping and using stored records allocated? Recent studies by Teuscher, Ketelaar and Rauschert, to name just a few, show how illuminating such an approach can be. 47 Another area with great promise, in which little has been done so far, examines the ways in which the deployment of stored records could fail. How did recordkeeping break down amid various forms of contestation, and what characteristics of any given configuration led to recordkeeping perceived as ineffective?
The potential for further insights through the close study of past repositories is enormous. Studies that consider archives as rich cultural sites of action are particularly desirable, moreover, because many disciplines beyond history have also experienced an archival turn in the last decades, looking to human recordkeeping from the past as a vital resource for a wide range of investigations. Archives are indeed a critical resource for understanding the human past, along with other sources of knowledge. If we rely on archives to understand the past, however, we must also understand archives – how they formed, how they operated in different eras, and how their contents have come down to us.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the following institutions for research support and funding: The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Newberry Library; the University of California Academic Senate; and the Tiroler Landesarchiv Innsbruck and Dr Christoph Haidacher. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and at a workshop sponsored by the ARCHives Project at Birkbeck College, University of London (Filippo de Vivo, PI).