Knowing Like a State: The Transformation of Political Knowledge in Swiss Archives, 1450–1770

Abstract

Recent efforts to understand the political culture of early modern Europe have looked beyond the policies of rulers and the theories of intellectuals to concentrate on how government was practiced under complex and rapidly changing circumstances. Spurred by increasingly sophisticated insights into the “technologies of power” available in the medieval and early modern periods, a central realization of newer studies has been that political change resulted not simply from greater centralization and efficiency in the military, fiscal, and legal spheres but equally from a transformation of how Europeans understood the political world. Studies by medievalists on orality, literacy, and the cultures of record keeping have made it particularly clear that changes in both the nature and the amount of political knowledge available to rulers and subjects helped to determine who carried out the work of dominion and how that work was performed.1 As M. T. Clanchy puts it for the Middle Ages, authorities increas-