Abstract
Reviewed by: Konrad Hirschler, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
The present book is based on the 2014 conference ‘Transforming Information: Record Keeping in the Early Modern World’, which has already led to the publication of a first volume, The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe (2016). The archive has become by now such a thoroughly studied topic that we have the archival turn, archive-as-process, archival agency, archival practices and a host of other buzz words. To come into such a crowded field with an edited volume (especially one with conference proceedings) is not without risk as the claim to originality is not easily made and as thematic coherence is not easily achieved. However, the three editors of this volume and the contributors offer us a splendid volume indeed that is a pleasure to read. The contributors include most historians and archivists who have made a discernible impact on the history of the early modern archive in Europe (one notable absence is Markus Friedrich), and it is impressive to see the research capacity that has developed in this area. The various contributions to this volume do a very good job of highlighting issues such as the problematic nature of the vocabulary we are using to analyse things archival, the role of human agency and the relationship between publicity and secrecy.
The editors’ ‘Introduction’ is a highly informative article providing a concise overview of recent scholarly trends, questions of terminology and areas of future research. Randolph Head offers a comparative study of archival transformation in Würzburg and Lisbon, and provides along the way interesting sections on other world regions and conceptual issues. Filippo De Vivo discusses in what ways administrations in Italian city states built up sophisticated information management systems to deal with the exploding size of diplomatic correspondence between 1450 and 1650. Jacob Soll’s contribution argues that the genesis of the French centralized state archive under Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the seventeenth century can only be understood by seeing the strong link between archival practices and mercantile accounting. The article by Arnold Hunt emphasizes the agency of the ‘technicians of the archive’, the secretaries, in early modern England as prime actors in the archival transformation of that period. In his case study of the Spanish empire, Arndt Brendecke highlights that the function of the central archive of Simancas cannot be reduced to one single function, organizing knowledge, as this archive was more multifaceted and served also seemingly anti-archival functions, especially oblivion and concealment. Kate Peters engages with a similar question and examines debates on public rights of access in revolutionary England to argue that the Crone’s room for manoeuvre was significantly limited by other actors in the political sphere. In their contribution, Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass stay in early modern England and examine the materiality of archival records (strings, bundles, bags, etc.) to suggest wonderful arguments on these items’ multitudinous life-cycles and trajectories. Sundar Henny examines the private manuscript culture in seventeenth-century Zurich in a fascinating study on the materiality of specific books, though the ‘archive’ is not the most salient category of analysis in this article. Brooke Palmieri analyses English Quaker archives, here mostly anthologies of documents produced within the Quaker communities. Sylvia Sellers-García takes up cases of inquisition documents from Mexico and Guatemala to forcefully argue for the importance of temporal and spatial distance in order to understand how archival practices worked and what they were meant to do or not to do. Kiri Paramore takes Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate to argue for the existence of a trans-Asian Sinosphere that engulfed also shared notions of information management and archivalities.
There is thus sufficient material to define new common ground and there are two main themes that strongly emerge out of the contributions: firstly, the relationship between the development of the archive and state formation is much less straightforward than a Focauldian vision of panoptical surveillance might imply. Repeatedly, we see the failure of the emerging state structures to effectively control and manage information, while we see a host of other actors, often on the periphery of the newly emerging states, successfully challenging the centre’s strategies and aims. Secondly, the archive and archival practices can only be studied in a comparative perspective when moving beyond European case studies. The bold title ‘Early Modern World’ seems at first glance slightly out of place as nine out of the 11 contributions deal with Europe (and one of the remaining two with colonial Spanish America). However, the editors and several contributors make discernible efforts to keep in mind that they are dealing with a rather small part of the world and to acknowledge scholarship on the archive in the wider world. The only point of criticism of the volume in this regard is that it repeatedly operates with rather worryingly essentialist categories (‘Islamic archivalities’ and ‘Islamic record-keeping’) that are contrasted with ‘European’ ways of doing things. Yet, once one includes examples from other world regions it seems increasingly clear – at least to this reviewer – that the differences between Cairo and Venice are not significantly larger than those between Simancas and London.
Overall, this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in archives or early modern Europe, and has several excellent chapters that can be used for teaching.