Configuring European Archives: Spaces, Materials and Practices in the Differentiation of Repositories from the Late Middle Ages to 1700

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.