Archival Transformations in Early Modern European History

Abstract

This special issue addresses a double transformation. The first is the historical process that saw a dramatic increase in the production of documents and a substantial improvement in their management and preservation throughout Europe between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The early modern period, broadly conceived, is often described as the age of print, but it was also the great time of archives, understood as both the physical repositories and organized offices established by institutions or collectivities to store handwritten documents produced in the course of continuous functions with a view to long-term use. For many European historians, the process of centralization, expansion and (more or less successful) rearrangement of archives is symbolized by the establishment of the great Simancas and Vatican archives in 1540 and 1612 respectively. But, as the articles collected here demonstrate, smaller states also enacted reforms in record-keeping, and these changes were more concerned with archives than with central institutions. The second transformation is interpretive and methodological. Archives have long been at the centre of historians’ research, but over the last ten to fifteen years, an ‘archival turn’ in disciplines ranging from history, literature, anthropology and the social sciences has transformed archives from sites of research into objects of enquiry in their own right. These works study the evolving processes of selection, ordering and usage that produced archives not as neutral repositories of sources but as historically constructed tools of power relations, deeply embedded in changing social and cultural contexts. The history of archives has been long practised by archivists, who are professionally aware that documents were neither produced nor arranged as