Historians in the archive

Hedda Gabler had hardly arrived home, after an almost 6-month honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman, when she raised her voice in complaint about the utterly unromantic adventures that had befallen her. What a disappointment to spend long days alone in foreign cities with a newly-wed husband enjoying nothing so much as sitting in archival reading rooms and taking notes from medieval documents, every day, from the early morning to the late evening! What a disillusion to hear him talk, night and day, about nothing except the medieval cottage industries on which he planned to write a book! Hedda Gabler, the frustrated protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same title (Ibsen, 1962[1890]), seemed to have married the very incarnation of what, by the late 19^th century, was a new type of scholar: a historian who did not dare to write a line without having his information backed by primary sources (original documents, as distinguished from secondary literature), preferably consulted in situ, in whatever archival depository or musty cellar they happened to be located.

Ibsen’s sketch may seem a caricature, belonging to an age-old genre of ironic commentary on the eccentricities of maladjusted scholars (Nuttall, 2003). Nonetheless, at around the time of Hedda Gabler’s appearance, in 1890, historical scholarship in Europe had arrived at a point where a Jørgen Tesman-type of historian had become less unthinkable than in earlier decades of the century. Tesman’s commitment to archival research, to start with, fitted well with what has been called an ‘archival turn’ in mid-19^th-century historiography – a turn towards archives as privileged sites of historical knowledge production (Eskildsen, 2008). This ‘turn’ should not be misunderstood as implying that 19^th-century historians were the first to discover the importance of source materials kept in (official or less official) archival depositories. Neither does it imply, of course, that all historians, throughout Europe and beyond, transformed themselves into ardent visitors of archives abroad and at home. ‘Historian’ was, after all, an unprotected title, the range of which depended on the standards that were applied. What the expression ‘archival turn’ seeks to highlight is rather that these standards were subject to change, particularly though not exclusively in academic circles. ‘Archival turn’ is shorthand for an increased tendency especially among academic historians – those appointed to often newly created university chairs in history – to equate professional historical knowledge with knowledge based on primary source research, that is, practically speaking, on knowledge gained from unpublished source material that was usually kept in archives. As one German advocate of this development, quoted elsewhere in this issue at some greater length, put it succinctly: ‘Today, complete and firm mastery of source material counts as a first requirement of all historical research’ (Kehr, 1994[1913]: 254).

If this is what historians understand the ‘archival turn’ in 19^th-century historical studies to be, then the adjective (‘archival’) clearly has a more specific referent than the word ‘archive’ in contemporary cultural theory. Partly under the influence of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, cultural theorists have come to stretch the concept of the ‘archive’ so as to make it include virtually every ordering system, administrative procedure and storage device used for wielding power and control over the world. Speaking about the ‘colonial archive’, for instance, Thomas Richards contends that the archive ‘was not a building, not even a collection of texts, but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire’ (Richards, 1993: 11). Likewise, for Ernst van Alphen, archives include such refined administrative procedures as employed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. The Nazis, he claims, ‘were master archivists’ (Van Alphen, 2008: 67).

Although this line of scholarship has yielded crucial insight into the political power exercised by archival ordering systems, Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook rightly complain that a broad notion of ‘archive’ tends to distract attention from what historians and archivists traditionally understood archives to be: institutions that keep historical records (Schwartz and Cook, 2002: 2). This distraction is unfortunate, because archives in this classical, institutional sense can be as powerful, politically speaking, as colonial administrations. Archives exercise a discursive power in shaping what can be thought and said about the past. If, for instance, women and/or indigenous people are largely absent from the records kept in archival institutions, historians relying on such records will have to summon considerable ‘counter-power’ to avoid replication of male and/or colonial power structures in their own historiographical discourse (Stoler, 2009).

It is from this specific angle that the articles collected in this special issue re-examine the ‘archival turn’. While previous scholarship has paid ample attention to the methods that 19^th-century historians developed for the study of archival material (codified in influential manuals like Bernheim, 1889), to the epistemologies they developed in tandem with these methods (e.g. in Droysen, 1868) as well as to the institutions they created for the study of archival records (such as a number of national institutes in Rome, close to the Vatican Archives), this special issue explores the influence that archives, in a classic, institutional sense, exerted on the practices of 19^th-century historiography. How did the archival turn affect historians’ working manners? What did it take to travel through Europe in an age without cars or high-speed trains and to spend long weeks transcribing ancient documents in badly lit rooms? What kind of demands did such intensive archival research make on the historian’s persona and, not least, on the home front (on spouses such as Hedda Gabler)? How contested was this archival research imperative, with its underlying autopsy principle? How did it spread geographically, in and outside Europe? And what alternatives, if any, were or became available, in and outside the emerging world of ‘professional’ historiography?

What makes these questions pertinent is that the archive’s influence on historical studies is nowhere as tangible and visible as in historians’ day-to-day working habits. Even more important, however, is that such a focus on concrete procedures and working manners enables us to examine to what extent ideals of archival research were actually translated into practice. Rather than assuming that historians did what they were said to do, or conducted their inquiries in accordance with emerging ideals of archival research, we should critically investigate the scope and limits of this so-called archival turn. So, the study of the ‘archival turn’ has to take a ‘practice turn’, so to speak, not only to flesh out how a growing emphasis on archival research actually worked out in practice, but also and especially to scrutinize and verify such claims as that an archival turn radically transformed 19^th-century historical scholarship.

In addressing these issues, the contributions gathered on the pages that follow focus on four questions:

What the articles show, each in its own way, is not merely that the archival turn hardly existed in the singular – or, positively, that it entailed a rather diverse set of epistemological considerations, heuristic advices and more or less approved methods – but also and especially that the archival research imperative was an ideal that invariably met with obstacles and criticisms from various corners (not only including lonely or weary partners). Especially, the authors’ focus on historians’ working practices brings to light how difficult it was, under 19^th-century circumstances, to live up to high ideals of archival research – and that 19^th-century historians, accordingly, had to invest significantly in managing such frictions between noble dreams and humble realities.

Finally, as for honeymoons turned into archival research trips: Ibsen did not make this up. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was one among others who really travelled to Italy, in 1912, with his recently married wife at his side and a notebook in his suitcase (Geyl, 2009: 39–40, 43–4). The Norwegian playwright may have overemphasized, however, the unromantic side of it. Perhaps it was not the honeymoon that was abused for scholarly purposes, but rather the archival journey that opened up possibilities for romantic travel that would have otherwise been unimaginable in an age when travel abroad was still reserved for the privileged and well-to-do. The growing importance attached to research in foreign archives might have had the pleasant side effect of offering young historians and their spouses opportunities for widening their geographical and cultural horizons – as Geyl suggests when he reports in far greater detail about the Italian museums that he and his wife frequented than about the archives that his academic sponsor expected him to visit (Geyl, 2009: 40).