Archival transformations in early modern Europe

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 susbtantial improvement in their management and preservation throughout Europe between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century. The early modern period, inclusively 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 organised 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 centralisation, expansion, and (more or less successful) rearrangement of archives is symbolised by the establishment of the great Simancas and Vatican archives respectively in 1540 and 1612. But, as the articles collected here demonstrate, smaller states too enacted reforms in record-keeping, and the changes concerned more archives than those of central institutions. The second transformation is interpretive and methodological. Archives have long been at the centre of historians’ research, but over the last ten-fifteen years an ‘archival turn’ in disciplines ranging from history to literature, anthropology and the social sciences has turned 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.