Medieval England saw a dramatic expansion in record keeping. Records of Chancery chronicling the workings of the King’s Council began to be kept in 1085 and the Exchequer started storing state financial documents a year later in 1086. The same year saw the production of the Domesday Book, which remains a central tool of historical research into medieval England. Its name alludes to a perceived parallel between the finality and completeness of assessors’ appraisal of individual Englishmen’s wealth and the final judgement of all men’s moral worth anticipated by scripture. This preoccupation with record keeping, and representation of it in productions of biblical histories, is Sarah Elliott Novacich’s subject in Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England.

Novacich explores how medieval thinkers engaged with the idea of the past through close examination of representations of three episodes of sacred history: the loss of Eden, the packing of Noah’s ark, and the harrowing of hell. Considering poetry, performance records, and iconography, Shaping the Archive demonstrates how medieval artists used biblical stories to consider the purpose and practice of record keeping. Plays depicting the loss of Eden blur the relationship between act and record, stories of Noah’s ark scrutinize the difficulty of compiling inventories, and portrayals of the harrowing of hell deliberate separation of the past from the present. Reading poetry alongside records of performance, Novacich explores the ways in which medieval Englishmen related to the archive.

Novacich explains that she uses the term archive to “suggest a flexibility of inventory, encompassing the sense of ‘library,’ ‘treasure trove,’ and even codicological compilation, since a codex might be an archive unto itself” (3). This broad definition allows her to engage with fascinating evidence of a medieval philosophy of collection, but avoids consideration of some of the starker realities of early record keeping. Describing a medieval interest in saving complete representations of history, Novacich identifies representations of collection, storage, and preservation without engaging with processes of selection, exclusion, and destruction. Instead, Shaping the Archive asks compelling questions about medieval ideas of record creation, to what extent representation needs to be mimetic or might deploy creative license in its presentation of history, and the consequences this had for individuals’ understanding of their own place in time.

By investigating what late medieval representations of inventories reveal about perceptions of history, narrative, and the accumulation of knowledge, Novacich creates a guide to how we might approach records retained today. Exploring the desire reflected in medieval texts to create collections that fully account for the world, she identifies a cultural value that coincides with, and perhaps explains, the rise in bureaucracy in the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. She argues that in these documents there is evidence of repeated attempts to compress time and space onto page or stage to offer records that rival the completeness of original events. If this is so—if medieval reality can really be challenged by collected representations of events—this may be the cultural shift that gave rise to defining elements of Renaissance society.

The start of the modern era is often dated from the beginning of the State Papers in 1509, a record series that set a precedent for the narration of government through the correspondence and papers of the secretary of state. Early modernism is thus defined, at least in part, as a cohesive archival approach to recording, and thus creating, history. Novacich’s argument, that medieval Englishmen struggled with, and ultimately revered, modes of historical inventory sets the stage for the English Renaissance, its self-aware documentation, and its own fixation on the past. The examples she chooses out of representations of sacred history in drama and poetry offer an elegant case study of how literature might explicate a historical crisis, providing a brilliant argument for even greater exchange between fields in the humanities.