̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Liesbeth Corens

Remember, remember: how education “beyond the seas” kept Catholicism alive

amb206 — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 06:00:00 +0000

In 1698 a painter and his wife, William Seeks and Mary Brittell, appeared in court in central London. ̽��ֱ��crime for which they stood before the Middlesex Sessions in the borough of Clerkenwell was to have sent their nine-year-old daughter out of the country to be educated in a convent in France.

As Roman Catholics living in staunchly Protestant England, Seeks and Brittell were not able to have their children taught according to the tenets of their faith, which was held to be idolatrous in its teaching and treasonous in its allegiance to Rome. Thus they made what must have been complicated and costly arrangements for their daughter to travel to Paris – a journey not without hazards.

As part of a wider study of English travel, pilgrimage and exile, Liesbeth Corens, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, has been looking at the ways in which Catholic families made use of religious houses in continental Europe, chiefly France and the Low Countries, in order to instil Catholic devotion in their children as a foundation for their lives as upholders of the ‘true faith’.

“Education has long been a battleground between faiths with different beliefs and conflicting allegiances. Seldom has this been more striking than in 17^th century England. Society was riven with religious divides as the fiercely Protestant Government sought to repress the vestiges of Catholicism while, for their part, Catholics were equally determined to educate the next generation to pass on their beliefs,” said Corens.

“There’s been considerable research into the role of religious orders in preparing English Catholics for life as permanent members of seminaries and convents – but much less research into English families’ use of the schools run by religious orders in continental Europe. These schools offered places for children who would spend several years being instructed in both the tenets of their confession and the skills of participating in worldly society, before returning to England to start their own families.”

England broke with Rome in the mid-16^th century when Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Many families, however, refused to comply with laws making Henry “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England” and retained their allegiance to the Pope.

In the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of 1605 Guido Fawkes famously conspired to put a bloody end to Protestant government. ̽��ֱ��plot was quashed, and Fawkes and his compatriots hung, but Catholic families continued to observe their faith. Operating clandestinely, they housed priests and smuggled in books and rosaries.

Seventy years later, the Popish Plot (1678) saw the country once again gripped by a surge of anti-Catholic feeling, leading to the execution of at least 22 Catholics. Titus Oates, who had studied at the Jesuit College in St Omer in France, claimed that the Jesuits were plotting to kill Charles II and return England to Catholicism. In the months that followed these (false) accusations, the government reissued acts against educating children in the Catholic faith and stepped up its watch on Catholics’ movements within the country and across the Channel.

Plans floated in Parliament included a proposal to remove children from Catholic families and place them with Protestant relatives. Proclamations were issued to prevent children being sent overseas. ̽��ֱ��Middlesex Sessions court records for 1698 state that Seeks and Brittell had acted unlawfully in sending their daughter “beyond the seas out of the obedience of his Majesty… on purpose to have the said Child remain and be trained up in a Nunery and strengthened in the popish Religion”.

Corens’ investigation of the private archives of a number of Catholic families, in parallel with research carried out in the archives of religious orders has enabled her to build a picture of the ways in which English Catholics, in the context of ferocious opposition and danger to their lives, raised their children to pass their faith on to future generations.

It’s impossible to know how many Catholic children were sent overseas to be educated. Institutional provision for English Catholic education in northern Europe started in the late 16th century and the schools remained active until the 18th century. Over two centuries, these schools educated large numbers of children. They ranged widely in size: the biggest college, at St Omer, had about 180 students on their roll at any one time, while the smallest institutions took around a dozen pupils.

̽��ֱ��education that Catholic children received in convents and colleges overseas was largely in line with the education their Protestant peers received in grammar schools. In both schools, the focus was on Latin and the classics. However, there was one big difference: Catholic children did their learning in the context of a fully functioning religious community, observing and absorbing religious practices that had been outlawed in England.

“ ̽��ֱ��sheer force of feeling about religious matters shouldn’t be understated: to practise Catholicism was an act of subversion, albeit one carried, in many cases, from a position of privilege, and within the bounds of polite society,” said Corens.

“ ̽��ֱ��language of militancy permeated education in the schools run by religious orders. Children were expected to learn their catechism with precision and be able to instruct others whenever an opportunity occurred. On leaving school, it was expected that children would take up the battle for the Catholic church as soldiers of Christ. At the Jesuit College of St Omer, the book recording prizes refers to students as milites – soldiers.”

Catholic parents were acutely aware of their duty to provide the best possible religious education for their children whose contribution to the English mission was seen to be as vital as that made by priests. Corens’ research reveals the careful planning that went into the education of children from middle and upper class homes. She said: “In their early years, children were seen as vulnerable – and this vulnerability, while putting them in danger, also provided an opportunity.”

A formative spell in a seminary or convent was only part of the plan. ̽��ֱ��next step was for many young people to undertake the Grand Tour in the company of a tutor who would be chosen by, or certainly approved by, the religious house. Travel to the classical sites of Europe – and exposure to cultured society in its capital cities - would prepare young Roman Catholics to return to England to take up life as ladies and gentlemen in the ‘better’ ranks of society.

̽��ֱ��handwritten notes of one tutor – a Benedictine priest called W Champney – have survived in the archives of Douai Abbey. Describing Champney’s travels between 1706 and 1712, they offer a rare insight into the ambitious programme young travellers went through as they absorbed the classics, learnt to identify the exemplary young men of the past, took part in processions, visited pilgrimage sites and attended mass.

Records show that huge care was taken in the selection of tutors. Planning to send his son abroad for education in 1699, Robert Throckmorton asked the abbot of the English Benedictines in Dieulouard, north-east France, to propose suitable candidates. ̽��ֱ��abbot came up with three candidates. Mr Scudamore had “good sense” and was “ingenious”; Mr Rigmade was “an extraordinary good Religious man, very mortifiyed and retired”; Doctor Moore was a “man more dignified”.

̽��ֱ��best known Catholic travel tutor was Richard Lassels. A prolific writer and scholar as well as priest, he had a reputation as an educator of gentlemen and tutor of “persons of distinction” and was the first to use the term Grand Tour. Lassels’ travel guide ̽��ֱ��Voyage of Italy, published in 1670, was the outcome of five years of journeys and pilgrimages and, as such, it poses a challenge to the notion that the Grand Tour was broadly secular.

Travel was an essential ingredient of a rounded education. In the late 17^th century the Lancashire landowner William Blundell had given his grandsons Edmund and Richard Butler a basic education in English, French and Latin. Though impressed with the boys’ progress, Blundell felt that he had reached the limit of what was possible in the “obscurest part of the nation” which lay “out of the Rode of Intelligence”. He was especially concerned about Edmund: “both his garb & his language are very much impaired by playing with the rude boyes of our neighbourhood”.

To remedy the situation, Blundell was prepared to make the considerable financial sacrifice needed to send Edmund to the Jesuit College in St Omer (“which speaks the best language in France without comparison”) and later to Blois or Paris to learn “dancing, fenceing and horsemanship” – skills that would equip him to be a gentleman ready to manage the family estates.

Girls were an important part of the strategy to carry the family faith forward. Blundell had earlier sent his daughter Jane overseas to be educated. On her travels, she has endured many storms and difficulties. Blundell explained away these hardships as character-building. In a letter to Jane, he wrote that she had “arryved with more merit (by reason of more trouble) then if an Angel had taken you up lyke Abacuce [Habakkuk, biblical prophet] & dropt you before the Grate of the Convent”.

Correspondence of another Catholic landowner, Marmaduke Constable, reveals a belief that an overseas education was both a safe haven, away from Protestant influence, and a seedbed. Parents should bide their time in being reunited with their sons and daughter. During extensive travels in Europe in the mid-18^th century, Constable visited the children of Carnaby Haggerston. Constable recommended that Haggerston should not yet recall his son: “If you send for him now, you will ruin him for ever.” Haggerston, wrote Constable, should imagine his son “as if he had been asleep ever since he came… and that if was just now time to waken him, which if you do in the right way, I am sure you will see him come home to your pleasure and satisfaction.”

Subversive though their confessional adherence may have been, Catholics did not cut themselves off from their largely Protestant neighbourhoods. Constable, Blundell, Throckmorton and other Catholic landowners were players on the local political scene, and were expected to use their position to support less wealthy Catholics in their households and on their lands. Simultaneously, they cultivated bonds with their Protestant peers out of a positive commitment to civility and neighbourliness, using the skills acquired abroad to excel in sociability.

Nevertheless, the dangers of educating children in a faith that had been banned – and was deemed superstitious and idolatrous - were very real. In the 1670s, two young brothers called Francis and Michael Trappes, pupils at the English College in Douai, northern France, sent medallions to their siblings back at home in England but refrained from enclosing the rosaries they wanted to share with them because they thought “perhappes they would be troublesome for the bearer”.

Corens said: “What emerges in my research is how the transition from violent confrontation between Catholics and Protestants to peaceful toleration was much bumpier, and more nuanced, than conventional narratives suggest. In their determination to practise their faith, Catholics were stubbornly subversive in breaking out of an insular situation to interact with the rest of Europe. Their networks and connections were dynamic in a way that we consider to be much more modern.”

Liesbeth Corens is a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College.

Inset images: prospectus for the English Jesuit College for boys in St Omer (Stonyhurst College); notes for young travellers written by a Benedictine tutor in the 1700s (Douai Abbey); corridor and exterior of the English convent in Bruges (Sister Mary Aline)

Bonfire night marks a plot in 1605 to burn down the Houses of Parliament. It’s also a reminder of the ferocious divides that existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Historian Liesbeth Corens is researching the measures taken by English Catholics to educate their children in the 'true faith'.

Education has long been a battleground between faiths with different beliefs and conflicting allegiances. Seldom has this been more striking than in 17th century England.

Liesbeth Corens

Abbot Geoffrey Scott

̽��ֱ��'Blue Nuns' in Paris educated the daughters of some leading English Catholic families, watercolour in Teignmouth Abbey Archives.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Q&A: how archives make history

amb206 — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Archives unlock doors to the past. For the past seven years historian Dr John-Paul Ghobrial has been in pursuit of an extraordinary traveller called Elias of Babylon. Elias lived in the 17th century and journeyed from his birthplace in Mosul (Iraq) across Europe and as far as Peru and Mexico. Ghobrial’s research on the trail of Elias has taken him to archives in Europe, the Middle East and South America, as he has pieced together the clues left behind by Elias during his global adventuring.

Ghobrial, a specialist in the early modern period at Oxford ̽��ֱ��, is among the speakers addressing an international audience at a conference later this week (9-10 April 2014) at the British Academy. 'Transforming Information: Record Keeping in the Early Modern World' will look at the ways in which our understanding of the past has been shaped by archives. Ghobrial will talk about Eastern Christians who, like Elias, started new lives in Europe in the 17th century. Many used their linguistic talents to work as archivists and copyists of Middle Eastern manuscripts.

Convened by three Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� historians, the two-day event will focus on an era that saw an explosion in record keeping as a result of a growth in literacy, burgeoning bureaucracy and advances in technology. In many respects, there are parallels between this transformation and the information revolution taking place today as a result of digitisation.

Speakers from Europe and the USA will share their expertise in fields as diverse as French feudal records, information gathering in early modern Japan, and the use and misuse of papers at the epicentre of the Spanish empire. ̽��ֱ��sessions will consider from multiple viewpoints how, and just as importantly why, the archives that underpin much of historical research came into being.

Professor Alexandra Walsham, who is organising the conference with colleagues Dr Kate Peters and Liesbeth Corens, said: “When we examine an archive today in a library or online, we are seeing it stripped of the context that is so important to its meaning and significance. ̽��ֱ��creation, organisation, preservation and destruction of archives are never neutral or impartial activities: they reflects a society’s fundamental preoccupations and priorities.

She continued: “ ̽��ֱ��conference will look at the major surge in record-keeping in the early modern world against the backdrop of wider technological, intellectual, political, religious and economic developments. It should not be assumed that an archive provides unmediated access to the past; rather record keeping practices fundamentally shape - and skew - our vision of history.”

We asked ten of the conference participants to answer some key questions about archives with particular reference to the period 1500 to 1800.

1. What constitutes an archive in the early modern period?

Filippo de Vivo (Birkbeck, ̽��ֱ�� of London) replies:

Today, we think of archives as repositories of sources for the use of modern historians. But they originated as working tools of organisations (large or small) that produced large amounts of documents in the course of their activities. In the early modern period, many institutions showed an increasing awareness of the importance of preserving those records as information (about something: for example, population size) or proof (of, and often against, something: for example, territorial boundaries). Far from neutral collections, they were instruments of conflict.

As for their aspect and arrangement, think of cabinets, with chests and drawers – the word archive comes from the Latin arca, for box – but bags were also common. They were stacked at the back of offices with secretaries writing at their desks, and they increasingly occupied separate rooms; replete with documents bound or simply bundled together, they stretched back decades and even centuries. Some were neat and tidy, as indicated by this picture of the Venetian chancery – but others must have been decidedly messier, and we know that many different kinds of people went to archives to find out about legal precedents, fiscal duties, property rights, and so on: archives were full with people as much as papers.

Image: Cancelloria Superiore, Venice

2. How is our understanding of history shaped by archives?

Jesse Spohnholz (Washington State ̽��ֱ��) responds:

In the early 19th century archives began to acquire a privileged status among the new academic historians; they were seen to offer the most direct access to voices from past centuries. For all the opportunities that archives offer, they structure and limit our understanding of the past. Consider the decision of what records to keep and what to set aside. From the Middle Ages, archives were established by political or religious institutions, whose officials aimed to preserve the authority of those institutions. Thus evidence in archives is not simply descriptive of the past, but prescriptive of how a people understood their present and wanted later generations to understand the past. One result is a privileging of male voices with the result that religion and politics look more male-dominated to us today than they may have been.

Similarly, because state and church officials recorded and preserved records of their activities from their own perspective, historians have sometimes overemphasized the importance of centralised states and official churches in the pre-modern era, or have treated as marginal those people who those officials wanted to treat as marginal (so-called heretics or rebels). ̽��ֱ��actions of pre-modern record keepers have sometimes led historians to focus too much attention on kings, princes, magistrates, and clergy, and too little on the people who ignored, flaunted, deceived or skirted the attention of those institutions. By their very nature, archives align themselves with a side in past conflicts; and when historians use archives as representations of the past without considering the voices they intentionally excluded, they often inadvertently do much the same thing.

Image: 18th-century inventory from a Dutch archive (Jesse Spohnholz)

3. How are archives created?

Arnold Hunt (British Library) writes:

Archives grow and develop over time. They are the creation, not of a single person, but of a long succession of clerks, secretaries, archivists and curators who have reshaped and reorganised them. As a curator myself, I’m intrigued by the ways that the physical organisation of archives can affect – and sometimes obstruct – their use by historians. As the old saying goes: where do you hide a leaf? In a forest. Where do you hide a document? In an archive.

̽��ֱ��archives held at the British Library have often been rearranged in the course of cataloguing. Sometimes this is inevitable. If an archive arrives in a suitcase, two cardboard boxes and a carrier bag, what do you do? You have to create some sort of order out of chaos. But by imposing ‘order’ on the archive we also impose meaning and interpretation. Until quite recently we used to organise correspondence according to a system that reflected (probably unconsciously) the British class structure: ‘Royal Correspondence’ (the royal family), ‘Special Correspondence’ (the great and the good), and ‘General Correspondence’ (everybody else). Nowadays we organise it by ‘fonds’ and ‘sub-fonds’, but in 100 years’ time I daresay this system will seem equally quaint and arbitrary and our successors will wonder why we adopted it.

I’ve been trying to reconstruct some of the ways that early modern archives were originally organised – not an easy task, when the contents of the archives have been shuffled and reshuffled over the centuries. Secretaries played a crucial role in the making and storing of written records, but they are often shadowy figures whose intermediary role is only visible to us in the notes or ‘endorsements’ that they scribbled on the backs of letters as they filed them away. I want to bring these ‘invisible technicians’ to the centre of attention.

Image: Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus quadrilinguis (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library)

4. Why were some records kept and others lost – and what can we learn from the gaps, silences and absences?

Kate Peters (Cambridge ̽��ֱ��) answers:

Most records were kept for the administrative purposes of the creating institution; the majority recorded transactions that either confirmed or exercised authority, or transferred resources. State records, and their keepers, therefore played an important role in the projection and maintenance of political power. My research explores this in the context of the political upheavals of the English civil wars.

̽��ֱ��collapsing authority of the Stuart monarchy is evident in the desperate attempts of Thomas Wilson, keeper of the State Paper Office, to control what was in his record office, and who could see it. Records considered ‘disadvantageous’ to the king were destroyed or locked away. Parliamentary regimes in their turn asserted their authority through record-keeping, establishing statutory provision to access the king’s papers, and prohibiting the removal of records from London because it would be prejudicial to the estates of his subjects. Records of the hated prerogative courts were destroyed. Parliamentary ordinances established registers of all estates and monies seized; by 1649, Levellers were calling for county record offices. Over the course of the English revolution state record keeping was transformed from a system by which the king’s authority was maintained, to one by which the rights of subjects, and later citizens, were asserted.

Record-keeping was a deeply political act: decisions about what was kept and what was destroyed can tell us a great deal about changing notions of legitimacy and political participation.

Image: Warrant from John Bradshaw, regicide and President of the Council of State in the republican regime asking for royalist papers to be sent to the State Paper Office ‘for publique use’ (National Archives)

5. What can we learn about (and from) the organisation of archives?

Kiri Paramore (Leiden ̽��ֱ��) writes:

How an archive is organised helps us understand when, how, and by whom it was used. My research focuses on the Confucian knowledge systems of early-modern Japan. Confucian discourse and correspondence at that time linked senior shogunal officials with the outside world, but also with simple village teachers. So writings of shogunal retainers, for instance, regularly turn up in forgotten archives of private figures of little status in peripheral areas. After kicking in the door of an old rice store (kura) housing a rich, forgotten private archive in northern Japan last year, the first thing a colleague did was to take photographs of how that room had looked (and been organised) when it was sealed 200 years ago. This helps to understand how, and by whom, the archive had been used.

Every archive has its own story. Archives of states are particularly interesting. For instance, the fact that military intelligence records are kept with anthropological or ethnological materials in academic archives of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) indicates how that regime used such material. Short commentaries in vernacular language attached to each foreign (Chinese, Manchu, Dutch) document suggest this archive was created for the less educated but hereditarily more senior liege lords who were making real decisions about foreign relations.

How different thematic folios were organised gives us an insight into the perceptions of the original compiler, but also of his state employer, and about issues of academic practice, civilisational categorisation (whether a country or culture was seen as ‘civilised’, ‘barbarian’ or something in between), and the use of information during this time of rapid global transformation.

Image: A typical Tokugawa period ‘kura’ for rice storage (Kiri Paramore)

6. What archives are you using in your current research?

Jennifer Bishop (Cambridge ̽��ֱ��) responds:

I am currently working with the records of the London Goldsmiths’ Company. ̽��ֱ��Company kept extensive records that cover every aspect of corporate life in the early modern period, from the regulation of trade and the assessment of skill, to the arbitration of personal disputes between goldsmiths and their friends, colleagues, and neighbours. ̽��ֱ��Company court minutes provide a rich source of information about the everyday activities and interactions of goldsmiths at all levels of the Company hierarchy. This detailed information allows us to reconstruct the personal and professional ties that bound company members together, and gave them a sense of communal and occupational identity, in the early modern period.

These Goldsmiths’ records were written by the Company clerk, who was also responsible for their safekeeping: the court books were kept locked in a chest in the clerk’s room in Company Hall, and nobody could access them without his permission. ̽��ֱ��clerk occupied a unique position in the Company, both participating in and commenting on the practices and rituals of corporate life. These records may therefore be read not only as documentary evidence of official business, but as creative texts that reflect the personal concerns and habits of the clerks who wrote them. As such, the Company records highlight important intersections between the literary, social, and corporate spheres of early modern London.

Image: Goldsmiths' Company court minutes book (October 1557) (Goldsmiths' Company)

7. What particular challenges do archives present to you as a researcher?

Liesbeth Corens (Cambridge ̽��ֱ��) writes:

One of the main challenges (but also delights) about research in archives is that they were and are precious to people. ̽��ֱ��sense of responsibility to protect the memory of past communities and individuals has motivated the creation, selection, and censoring of record collections across the centuries. This makes analysing an archive and its development revealing, as the motivations behind archives give us insights into the preoccupations of past communities. But sometimes the records are of such value – emotionally and materially – that access to them is restricted.

In my research on English Catholics, I often handle documents which are to me interesting glimpses of past communities but for many Catholics are sacred relics and part of devotional cultures. These written relics are an explicit illustration of a much wider process in which records have significance other than mere records of past actions. These sensitivities have shaped what has been passed down across generations and how it is understood. Keepers protect both the materiality and interpretation of the records in their care: the fragility of records sometimes means they are not open for research or some elements of ancestors’ less virtuous past are not shown very easily. ̽��ֱ��negotiations between protecting and analysing the past are fascinating to study and a challenging but rewarding exercise.

Image: Thomas Braithwaite of Ambleside Making His Will, 1607 (Lakeland Arts Trust)

8. What is the relationship between private and public record-keeping?

Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library) comments:

There are lots of similarities between how public records and private evidences and personal papers were stored in early modern England, in terms of bags, boxes, chests, bundles, files, drawers, and labels. Archival principles of arrangement didn't exist - antiquarians and others complained about how disorganized and dirty and mouse-eaten the public records were, and then other people went in and tried to clean them up and make sense of them, and then other people borrowed them and neglected to return them, and then other people got frustrated and tried to have them returned, to no avail! Clerks and keepers were torn between keeping up with the vast amount of documentation being produced on a daily basis by a wide range of bureaucratic entities, and dealing with an overwhelming backlog - the same challenge that faces archivists today.

̽��ֱ��private papers, or muniments, of England's landed gentry, were typically easier to keep under control. Property deeds were arranged by county, and each property might be "defended" with centuries'-worth of deeds, in case ownership was ever contested. Bills and receipts were often bundled together, and large account books and pedigrees maintained and saved. Different families saved other kinds of personal documents in a range of ways.

Some people saved their correspondence and personal papers, for example, or copied their letters into letter books and discarded the originals, while others burned or recycled them. Unless you came from a family with a long history in a single home with a "muniment" room, the chances of your papers surviving were pretty slim.

Image: Bundles of archives from a private collection (Heather Wolfe)

9. How can we best facilitate access to archives?

Valerie Johnson (National Archives) suggests:

Access to archives is a complex thing. When digitisation started coming in, it was widely seen as 'democratising the archive', and obviously, if something is digitised and available online, it massively increases access for those who might live hundreds or even thousands of miles away. But what happens if that digitised document is in medieval Latin? Digitising it doesn't improve 'access' at all for most people: they can't read the handwriting and even if they could, they can't understand the language.

So some things that look like an easy fix, aren't. And though digitisation is great for standard series like the census, putting material online can take the document out of context. Good cataloguing is in my opinion hugely important in opening up for others the potential treasure that might lie waiting to be uncovered within an archive. And access to the physical archive remains important - most people still get a huge thrill from having the original record in their own hands, feeling that there is nothing to beat the touch (and sometimes the smell) of the real thing.

But access to archives can only happen if there are archives to access - so the best way to facilitate access to archives is to value archivists, and their work.

Image: Magna Carta (National Archives)

10. What has been your most memorable or frustrating ‘archive moment’?

Mary Laven (Cambridge ̽��ֱ��) reports:

My most frustrating archive moment occurred after the publication of my first book: Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent. I wanted to embark on a new project in an unfamiliar Italian city, and so I decided to spend a month in Parma in Northern Italy looking at what appeared from the archive catalogue to be an extensive collection of early modern criminal records. On day one I was told that these records were invisibili (literally invisible, or unseeable, though I think this was an archivist's euphemism for 'mislaid'). Resolution: never again shall I broach a new archive without corresponding first with the staff.

More positively, I reckon my most memorable archive moment is about to happen. Yesterday I flew to central Italy with eight colleagues. We’re working on an ERC-funded collaborative project based in Cambridge: 'Domestic Devotions: ̽��ֱ��Place of Piety in the Renaissance Italian Home'. Our intention is to make a collective assault on the archives of the Marche. For the first time in my life this means that I'll be working alongside colleagues in a shared endeavour. Any problems with the palaeography? I'll ask one of the post-docs. Unsure what that devotional object was used for? My PhD student will know for sure. It's going to be bliss.

Image: Mary Laven and colleague examining documents in Macerata, Italy (Abigail Brundin)

̽��ֱ��early modern period (1500-1800) saw a surge in the keeping of records. A conference later this week (9-10 April 2014) at the British Academy will look at the origins of the archives that shape our understanding of history. We asked ten of the speakers to tackle some fundamental questions.

Record-keeping was a deeply political act: decisions about what was kept and what was destroyed can tell us a great deal about changing notions of legitimacy and political participation.

Kate Peters

John-Paul Ghobrial

Notarial document with the name of Elias in the left-hand margin, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cádiz

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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