Among the key developments that shaped the history of information in premodern Europe was the growing presence and visibility of an ever-widening group of self-designated information specialists claiming to have exceptional skills and expertise concerning the production, management, and processing of information. By developing a growing body of mental habits, social practices, and working skills; and by reflecting on these practices, by making them explicit, and by promoting them actively, often in a competitive and conflict-ridden way, these partisan information specialists structured and drove the impact of information on European history. In a way, information specialists were enthusiastic prophets of a self-fulfilling prophecy: they advocated what they were doing best, that is, caring for and working with information.
Information specialists came and come in many stripes and colors, some claiming to be specialists in information “in itself” (e.g., information scientists), others more narrowly focused on particular media forms that are assumed to carry information. Of particular importance among the latter are the many professionals dealing with written information: a particularly prominent subgroup are those carrying out specialized work in the archives, often simply subsumed under the label archivist. For conceptual clarity, it is helpful to distinguish between “archival workers” (i.e., people doing archival work) and “designated ‘archivists.’ ” In premodern Europe, the two were by no means coextensive, and even in the twenty-first century by no means all archival work is done by officially designated archivists. Thus, the term archivist as used in the following paragraphs is generally understood loosely, including, but by no means limited to, officially designated “archivists.”
Often, the role of archivists has been described in a paradoxical way: On the one hand, their presence is considered of utmost importance. Without adequate personnel, so the well-rehearsed trope goes, no archive can ever function properly. On the other hand, the archivist’s presence in the archive should be almost invisible. “Personal judgment” should be totally avoided, according to Hilary Jenkinson, the most important Anglophone archival theorist in the early twentieth century (as quoted by Elizabeth Shephard). It is only more recently and in the wake of important theoretical work by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida that this idea has been fundamentally challenged, not least by scholars working in a postcolonial framework. Contrary to Jenkinson’s notion, most scholars would now insist that the archive actually was a prime arena for different actors to enact their “personal judgments” or social agendas. Approaching the history of archives and record keeping via a closer look at archivists will thus highlight the close connection that archives had to surrounding social, political, and cultural developments.
While archival practices have been part of human history for many millennia, specialized archivists make an appearance in European sources only relatively late in that long history. Initially, certain individuals probably simply acquired increasing familiarity with governmental repositories in connection with other administrative duties. Among various secretaries or counselors, for instance, one person may eventually have assumed the role of de facto archival expert because he had developed a habit of working in and caring for certain documents. This, it seems, was initially the case with Thierry Gherbode in Flanders (ca. 1350–1421) before he became formally employed as archivist in 1399. Only gradually did such activities become more formalized, but from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries onward, the sources do mention with growing frequency that certain men were employed by princes and other owners of documents as “guardians of records” (garde des chartes) (e.g., Flanders, 1399) or “archivist” (archivarius) (e.g., Sicily, 1401). The emergence of such language is important, since it shows that the management of written documentation came to be seen as a set of specialized tasks. At least ideally, caring for records became an office in its own right, separated and potentially independent from other governmental functions.
But we should not overestimate such early archivists’ professionalism. It is important to look beyond the words and study the actual practices of archival work. “Archivist” had become an official title, but by no means did that mean that de facto archival work was carried out only by these officeholders. Quite to the contrary, many so-called archivists worked in the archive only part-time, and a wide variety of other jobs could be combined with the functions of an archivist. Some, such as Adrian vander Ee (d. 1464) in Flanders, combined active (and, in his case, effective) archival work with diplomatic service. Others worked primarily as counselors or secretaries. In such arrangements, the archival duties were not always of primary importance, and the title of archivist was often nothing but a lucrative sinecure. In Switzerland well into the nineteenth century, most state archivists worked in the archives only part-time, often combining their record-keeping duties with other governmental charges. We could characterize this development by saying that in these (more and more frequent) cases political work acquired an (albeit often only modest) archival dimension.
On the other hand, much archival work was (and still is) often taken over by people who were not called archivists. Scribes, secretaries, and other men working in princely and urban chancelleries carried out much archival work. Many smaller and medium-sized archives had, for most of their history, no dedicated personnel caring for them. Consider the parish archives, increasingly organized after the Council of Trent (1545–63): these important caches of documents generally remained under the care of parish priests with little or no previous expertise in record keeping. Entire areas of record keeping became professionalized only in the very recent past. Throughout economic history, for instance, private businesses—even if they held enormous amounts of records, as did the Datini, Fugger, or Welser firms—rarely employed dedicated specialists that could be meaningfully called archivists, yet their papers were often well cared for by people also charged with other tasks. In the private sphere of the family, women sometimes acted as archivists. Recent research has highlighted the role of wives and mothers in family accounting and account keeping as well as in the preservation, management, and transmission of the household papers. Well-known is the case of Lady Anne Clifford in Stuart England, who in her diaries displays significant interest in and mastery of her family’s papers. Similarly, in the case of scholarly families, often the widows took care of the papers of their late husbands.
It would thus be wrong to link the rise of archival practices in Europe exclusively to the emergence of a distinctive social class of dedicated specialists. And yet, there can be no doubt that the keeping and managing of records increasingly became a specialized task and eventually a proper profession. Several early and effective archivists are now well known to scholars, including Gérard de Montaigu in Paris (d. 1391), Diego Ayala in Spain (1512?–94), and Carlo Cartari in Rome (1614–97). Certainly their number was growing, their professionalism deepening, and their impact on the wider archival culture increasing. As more and more men were hired as archivists, their employment documents and instructions started to show a coherent, if idealized picture of the perfect archivist. The growing body of theoretical works on archives since the sixteenth century, which usually included at least a few paragraphs on archival personnel, helped to establish this image. By the end of the sixteenth century, the profession of archivist (together with its twin, the librarian) was well on its way to acquiring a distinctive profile. The ideal archivist was a man of honorable birth, dedicated and steadfast, trustworthy, and morally upright. Loyalty to his employer was his most important quality, and most official instructions contained stern admonitions not to divulge any governmental or dynastic secrets that the archivist might have learned while working in the archive. All instructions typically insist that this obligation to keep the arcana secret held for life (“bis in die Gruben,” into the grave, as the formula usually went), even in the case that the archivist should change employment.
These depictions of an ideal archivist were primarily moral in nature or focused on character traits but had little or nothing to say about technical capabilities, except for the very basic and mostly tacit assumption that every archivist should be able to read and write. That the Dukes of Württemberg in 1550 explicitly asked for knowledge of two languages (Latin and French) in addition to German was already an unusually specific request. Even the particularly elaborate description of the ideal archivist that Jakob von Ramingen gave in 1571 in the first (printed) monograph on archives contains almost nothing on technical expertise—his most specific point was simply that the archivist should “know about the law and politics.” With no clearly defined skill set for archivists conceptualized, no professional education for archivists could be institutionalized. Proper training institutions with academic standards of teaching emerged only in the nineteenth century in Paris, Vienna, Munich, and Marburg. France is an interesting example here. In 1821, King Louis XVIII founded the École Nationale des Chartes, today the major training center for archivists and librarians in France. Almost immediately the idea came up that the graduates of the École could (and should) staff the regional archives (archives départementales) created during the French Revolution. Yet it took until 1850 for that idea to become law (decree of February 4), and it took still further decades for the well-trained chartistes to actually take over regional and local archives. The establishment of these new cadres often went hand in hand with significant conflicts between exponents of older traditions of archival work and the newer, more academic and “scientific” archivists. Local pride, local customs, and local power arrangements could be significant barriers against the imposition of a coordinated archival workforce by the central government.
While explicit standards of education may have been lacking before the second half of the nineteenth century, many archival specialists prior to that time were nevertheless knowledgeable and experienced. Significant bodies of experiential knowledge accumulated and circulated among those working in archives. Families played an important part in the transmission of archival expertise. Fathers and uncles bequeathed their knowledge to sons or nephews. It is best to understand premodern archival training as a sort of apprenticeship: prospective archivists acquired familiarity with record keeping by observing experienced specialists, either while working in closely related administrative offices like chancelleries or by becoming adjuncts to senior archivists. Even today, while academic archival training is the high road to becoming an archivist, many countries still offer additional, more practice-oriented types of archival education, for instance through formal apprenticeships or internships.
Archivists were confronted with two major types of tasks. The archivist’s first responsibility was “to keep and conserve writings” (onus detinendi et conservandi scripturas) (Sicily, 1436). Archivists also had to create and maintain order in the archive. This meant, first and foremost, ordering the records in some meaningful way and creating reliable finding aids. In many employment contracts, the cataloging of documents and the creation of inventories were named as primary tasks. The ordering of knowledge implied significant *epistemic decisions: According to what structure should archivists sort the records? How should they (re)arrange them—in alphabetical order, in geographical, or in topical order? What categories should they use to divide the mass of documents into more manageable portions? How were they to create meaningful shelf marks?
In addition, ordering the archive implied a wide range of bodily labors. Archivists had to clean the rooms where the records were kept, control the physical arrangements of the storage facilities, and check on the material condition of the records themselves. Archivists carried piles of papers and *parchments, climbed ladders, chased rodents, and fought against the elements, sometimes quite literally, for instance when saving the precious materials from fire, water, or wind. To achieve their goals, archivists also had to work manually with individual documents. They had to glue and pierce documents, and they sewed them together, hung them on strings, or carefully placed them in boxes, envelopes, or folders. To do this, archivists relied on many utensils; today, they may rely on punchers, staplers, and, of course, computers for their work. Not least, the archivists of today use shredders, for they are responsible for deciding what documents are to be destroyed (in quantitative terms, more than 95 percent of all records produced today will never enter an archive). Organizing archives also meant looking beyond one’s own repository to understand its place in the bureaucratic structure. Archivists were key actors in governmental attempts to consolidate and centralize documentation. Traditionally, ministers or secretaries had kept in their private possession most of the papers they had worked with. During the *early modern period, this habit was increasingly seen as problematic, and archivists were more often charged with bringing such dispersed materials under government control. Inversely, archivists had to keep track of all documents checked out of the archive. Usually, they would keep specialized notebooks or registers for that purpose.
For most of European archival history, there were few instructions on what such an archival organization should look like. Employers in most cases often simply trusted the expert experience of their new employee. All that was specified was the hope that thanks to the good work of the archivists, the records could be better and more efficiently used in the future. This was an idea that became more and more important. With bureaucratic forms of government on the rise and with the administrative function of archives accordingly ever more explicitly expressed, the responsibility to feed records into decision-making processes became a second dimension of the archivists’ job description. They would search for and transport to councillors the relevant documents needed for decision making. In some cases, archivists actually sat in on the deliberations, allowing them to be dispatched to the archives more easily. Occasionally, this went beyond simply providing decision makers with requested documentation. Archivists could be called on to produce position papers summarizing what could be learned from archived documentation about specific areas of policy. We could characterize this development by saying that not infrequently archival work acquired a political and administrative dimension.
Also, archival work increasingly acquired a scholarly dimension. *Renaissance archivists such as Augustin Kölner in Munich (ca. 1470–1548) were regularly members of humanist circles. Like librarians (though perhaps to a lesser extent), archivists became, in the words of the historian Mario Rosa, “mediators in the *Republic of Letters.” They provided scholars with documents and, in more than one case, combined their work in the archive with scholarly investigations of their own, often leading to prominent publications. In the nineteenth century, the “historian-archivist” became dominant. The two professions of historian and archivist were both rapidly professionalizing and intimately connected. Individuals moved easily back and forth between the two careers. Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954), for instance, who became one of the most influential German historians of the first half of the twentieth century, had initially trained as an archivist. One wonders if and how this amalgamation of archival and historical thinking shaped subsequent developments of historiography. The ideal of the scholarly archivist, while never universally shared, remained prominent and widespread until well after World War II. In later decades, however, an alternative and much more restricted vision emerged under the label of “records management,” of a more technical and managerial approach to archival work. In most Western countries, this led to sharp debates about job ideals (in German: Berufsbilddebatte) among archivists and, along similar lines, also among librarians.
Who were the archivists, and where did they come from in social terms? By and large, it seems, the social recruitment of archivists follows the broader patterns of other *literacy-dependent professions. Initially, clerics played a significant role, and even today, the major part of the Catholic Church’s archives are headed, at least nominally, by clerics. Well into the nineteenth century, priests such as Andreas Baumgartner (Chur) or Leonard Ennen (Cologne) could also occasionally be found leading important secular repositories. By and large, however, clerical influence quickly waned, beginning in the fifteenth century. Archivists came to be seen as important cogs in the machinery of bureaucracy, making administrative experience and familiarity with the law important criteria for recruitment. This meant that a growing percentage of archivists was university trained. According to Ottnad, in sixteenth-century Württemberg, for instance, of fourteen archivists, eleven had attended university, of whom six had studied the law, a percentage that only increased over the next centuries (in the eighteenth century, seventeen out of nineteen had studied law). Two other characteristics changed in Württemberg over these two centuries: the age of entry declined significantly (from age 39 to 29.5), and the length of stay in the archive increased. Toward 1800, about 90 percent of the men stayed in the archive throughout their professional lives. By 1800, many examples to the contrary notwithstanding, being an archivist was thus on its way to becoming a proper profession that was chosen comparatively early in life and pursued for long periods. While many people working in European archives did come from lower strata of society, and while a few members of the (minor) nobility found pleasure in the archive, archival work attracted mostly members of the middle classes. Sons of pastors, doctors, and teachers, and especially sons of state employees abounded. And it was, most of the time, exclusively sons, since women entered into professional archival contexts only very late in this history. It is only around 1900, for instance, that a first wave of female archival experts became clearly visible in England. Only from the 1930s onward did women archivists such as Joan Wake or Ethel Stokes figure prominently in the British Records Association. In 1951, Ernst Posner spoke of a “large and increasing number of women members” of the Society of American Archivists. Five years later, one-third of its members were female. While setbacks and continuing gender imbalance should not be overlooked, it seems obvious that in the early twenty-first century the profession has significantly opened up toward women in the profession.
Markus Friedrich
See also bibliography; computers; documentary authority; information policy; learning; libraries and catalogs; scribes; secretaries; teaching