Review
Making Archives in Early Modern Europe: Proof, Information, and Political Record-Keeping, 1400–1700. Randolph C. Head,. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xviii + 348 pp. $120
Renaissance Quarterly, Vol.75(2), pp.642-643
07/01/2022
DOI: 10.1017/rqx.2022.144
Abstract
During the early modern period, rulers took increasing interest in documents as ongoing sources of political information—a process not unrelated to their efforts to consolidate power. In case studies touching down in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands, Head shows how scribes, secretaries, and chancellors elaborated archival systems with a set of stable medial forms and scholastic “little tools of knowledge” (the latter phrase is from Peter Becker and William Clark, Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices [2001]). [...]looking out from Europe, how did archival cultures form and develop in other societies and in colonial contact zones?
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Making Archives in Early Modern Europe: Proof, Information, and Political Record-Keeping, 1400–1700. Randolph C. Head,. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xviii + 348 pp. $120
- Creators
- Elizabeth Yale
- Resource Type
- Review
- Publication Details
- Renaissance Quarterly, Vol.75(2), pp.642-643
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press; Cambridge
- DOI
- 10.1017/rqx.2022.144
- ISSN
- 0034-4338
- eISSN
- 1935-0236
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/01/2022
- Academic Unit
- History
- Record Identifier
- 9984278119902771
Metrics
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