Making Archives in Early Modern Europe

Making Archives in Early Modern Europe
Author: Randolph C. Head
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108473784

Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.

The Birth of the Archive

The Birth of the Archive
Author: Markus Friedrich
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472130684

The dynamic but little-known story of how archives came to shape and be shaped by European culture and society

Making Archives in Early Modern Europe

Making Archives in Early Modern Europe
Author: Randolph C. Head
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108614361

European states were overwhelmed with information around 1500. Their agents sought to organize their overflowing archives to provide trustworthy evidence and comprehensive knowledge that was useful in the everyday exercise of power. This detailed comparative study explores cases from Lisbon to Vienna to Berlin in order to understand how changing information technologies and ambitious programs of state-building challenged record-keepers to find new ways to organize and access the information in their archives. From the intriguing details of how clerks invented new ways to index and catalog the expanding world to the evolution of new perspectives on knowledge and power among philologists and historians, this book provides illuminating vignettes and revealing comparisons about a core technology of governance in early modern Europe. Enhanced by perspectives from the history of knowledge and from archival science, this wide-ranging study explores the potential and the limitations of knowledge management as media technologies evolved.

Archives & Information in the Early Modern World

Archives & Information in the Early Modern World
Author: Liesbeth Corens
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018
Genre: Archival resources
ISBN: 9780197266250

Includes revised version of papers from a conference entitled "Transforming Information: Record Keeping in the Early Modern World" held at the British Academy in April 2014, together with three additional essays.

Archival Afterlives

Archival Afterlives
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-07-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004324305

Archival Afterlives explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. If early modern natural philosophers claimed all knowledge as their province, theirs was a paper empire. But how and why did naturalists engage with archives, and in particular, with the papers of their dead predecessors? This volume makes a firm case for expanding what counts as scientific labour, integrating scribes, archivist, library keepers, editors, and friends and family of deceased naturalists into the history of science. It shows how early modern natural philosophers pursued new natural knowledge in dialogue with their recent material past. Finally, it demonstrates the sustaining importance of archival institutions in the growth and development of the “New Sciences.” Contributors are: Arnold Hunt, Michael Hunter, Vera Keller, Carol Pal, Anna Marie Roos, Richard Serjeantson, Victoria Sloyan, Alison Walker, and Elizabeth Yale.

The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe

The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe
Author: Paul M. Dover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781107147539

This provocative new history of early modern Europe argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. These developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life. The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters. Engaging with historical questions across many fields of human activity, Paul M. Dover interprets the historical significance of this 'information revolution' for the present day, and suggests thought-provoking parallels with the informational challenges of the digital age.

Ingenuity in the Making

Ingenuity in the Making
Author: Richard J. Oosterhoff
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822988461

Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which ingenuity acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, charting the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

The Social History of the Archive

The Social History of the Archive
Author: Liesbeth Corens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2016
Genre: Archival resources
ISBN: 9780198801559

"This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but also as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of signifi cant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. Focusing attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800, the contributors to this volume place the processes by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes, analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, and evaluate the role of textual, pictorial, material and fi nancial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical defi nitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the politics of everyday life. They also illuminate the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to oblivion."--

Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226763293

Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.