A Longue Durée of Urban Historiography? Peter Ochs's History of Basel (1786–1822) From a Long-Term Perspective, in: History of Humanities 2 (2017), S. 101–130 (original) (raw)
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Archival Science, 2010
Cities in Italy, Germany and England experienced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a scriptural revolution. The city registers served the functional and archival memories of the city and its citizens. The creation, storage and use of records were social and cultural practices, embedded in and constituting communities of memory. The records were re-organized and re-used, repositioning the text in time-space within different communicational spectra. Records created and maintained by cities in early modern history were archives, the city archives were records.
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1421011/ In this article, I historicise a particular site of historical research that rose to prominence in the nineteenth century : state archives. In looking into the archive politics surrounding the historical studying of records and files, this examination explores the exchange between petitioners and the authorities, governmental administrative practices and measures of control, and the administrative communications of the Bavarian state relating to “the use of the archive” during the long nineteenth century. In contrast to the widespread assumption that the French Revolution and its European reverberations rendered superfluous the arcana imperii, I contend that the early-modern traditions and notions of the arcana imperii were key in the administering of access to archival material, and the availability of archival knowledge. According to the tradition of the arcana imperii, the purpose of state archives was first and foremost to safeguard the state and the welfare of the country. State archives were thus an integral part of the secret sphere of the state, and were kept deliberately separate from the public. As a result, historical interest in archival holdings necessitated the establishing of an administrative threshold, as well as the administrative supervision of the studying of records and files, measures aimed at reconciling the interests of the state with this secondary use of the archive. In this administrative context, the directors of state archives held a crucial position, for it was their responsibility to examine a petitioner’s integrity and discern their historical interests. What is more, a growth of interest in the archival holdings of the state created a dynamic that ultimately impacted on the institutional culture of state archives. The increasing political consideration and reflections upon “the use of the archive”, the spatial integration of historical research, as well as internal institutional changes of processes gave way to mellowing of the administration’s tight grip on archival research. Due to the continued interlinking of state archives and their governments throughout the nineteenth century, however, archives – a site of governmental rule – remained a site administered in accordance with the principles and notions of the arcana imperii.
The years around 1800 have often been regarded as being a fundamental epoch in European historiography, marking the point when history began to emerge as a modern professional discipline. In particular, the increasing accessibility of archives to historians has been regarded as allowing a more scientific historical methodology to develop. Yet archives have never been fully rational institutions or uncomplicated sites of knowledge, and in order to understand how they influenced historical writing it is necessary to study the practices of historians and other users, as well as the custodians and owners of archives. The articles in this themed issue all discuss the practices carried out by historians, researchers, and archivists in archives and libraries. In doing so, they reveal that there was a considerable continuity of practices that transcend the supposed divide of 1800.
A fundamental premise in modern archival theory and practice is provenance, namely the claim that bodies of records naturally and organically reflect the processes that produced them, 1 and that the ordering that results from such processes should be retained as records move to different repositories, even if the purpose of retention changes. Provenance itself, however, represents a nineteenth-century interpretation of record-keeping practices that emerged in the early modern period, in close connection with the emergence of the administrative state. Far from being natural, provenance represents a correlate in archivistics for such phenomena as Mabillonian diplomatics and the ius archivi of the eighteenth century, as I have argued elsewhere. 2 Provenance is thus of little help in understanding late medieval archives like one Simon Teuscher describes, which used visual signs to link an inventory to a repository: "pictorial signatures thus identified charters without integrating them into a model of political order…: the goat has 1 Nineteenth-and twentieth-century archival science made abundant use of metaphors of naturalness and organicism in describing the principle of provenance. A non untypical example appears in Ludwig Bittner's introduction to the published inventory to the Viennese Haus-, Hof-und Staatsarchiv: Gesamtinventar des Wiener Haus-, Hof-und Staatsarchivs, aufgebaut auf der Geschichte des Archivs und seiner Bestände, 5 Vols.
Urban polities were far in advance of the monarchical regimes of Western Europe in developing the tools of information storage and archiving. For autonomous cities, the archive had both a practical and a symbolic importance: it was the space around which the urban textual community was centered. As urban politics became more oligarchic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tools and administrators of municipal archiving were absorbed in v v the rising territorial sovereign state. It carried with it the germ of the information state.
Archives and history: Towards a history of ‘the use of state archives’ in the nineteenth century
2013
This article probes the relationship between archives and history by examining the archive policy on historical research in the first modern administration state of the German lands, the kingdom of Bavaria. Given the continuing tradition of the theory and practice of the arcana imperii in the 19 th century, state archives served first and foremost the state. As a result, researchers' interest in archival material was to undergo an administrative vetting procedure, in order to safeguard the interests of the state. By examining comparatively the cases of two petitioners supplicating for the historical use of state archives in Munich, the article showcases the policy of secrecy and the resultant administrative threshold separating the sphere of the arcana from the public. Caution guided the archive politics of state officials and, ultimately, their more or less explicit notions and concerns decided which material was finally to be released, in order to become a 'source' for historical study. Historical researchers such as the writer Ales-sandro Volpi and the historian August Kluckhohn were thus required to meet specific criteria and to overcome political hurdles, in order to gain access to the desired clues guarded by the state. As a result of this, the opportunity to inspect archival material was very much dependent on the political communication between petitioner and government , and its result, the granting or denial of access, was not without ramifications for historical research and the epistemic status of historical knowledge.