Making Information in Early Modern European Archives

Just as data is not information or knowledge, as Peter Burke has noted, so an accumulation of material is not an archive - at least not in late medieval and early modern Europe. Rather, the historical path from the medieval European archivium as repository of meaning-laden semi-sacral objects to the early modern political archive as ordered repository that allowed designated officers - a clerisy - to provide information in response to specific requests was complex, heterogeneous, and far from obvious to those who maintained and organized such repositories. This paper will focus on two critical processes that allowed accumulated documents carrying texts to become sources of deployable information: the generation of meta-data that detached texts from their carriers, and the postulation of authority that rendered archived texts valid as information (a term whose roots lie in the forensic and spiritual domains). The first process requires close examination of inventories and their organizational logic from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Inventories always had to fulfill the task of managing physical objects in space (documents), but equally, inventories always reflected their makers' understanding of what was important about those objects, such as their antiquity, their authorization by lord or community, and (not always primarily) their textual content. Changing assessments of documents produced changing forms of meta-data, culminating in the sophisticated cross-referenced registries of the seventeenth century. Shifting assessments of archival authenticity, expressed in the explicit ius archivi that emerged in late seventeenth-century Germany, provide a second perspective on the underlying issues. By conditioning archives on sovereignty while simultaneously arguing that archival provenance per se provided authenticity, this ius archivi modeled an institutionalization of information that was of great consequence for later developments in governance and historiography.  Evidence will be drawn from political archives across Europe from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.