This is a rich and valuable synthesis of the history of early modern archives and archival practices. In what is, sometimes controversially, described as an “archival turn,” historians have in recent years transformed their understanding of archives—as not merely repositories of sources, but as themselves historically constructed objects worthy of study in their own right. In this quickly evolving scholarship, it is extremely useful now at last to have the English translation of Markus Friedrich's book, first published in 2013.

The book's most attractive feature is its inclusiveness. After a thoughtful historiographic introduction and a chapter about the late medieval growth of record making and innovation in record keeping, Friedrich adopts a thematic approach. Chapter 3 presents the proliferation and institutionalization of documentary repositories large and small, belonging not just to princes and territorial rulers but also to noble families, corporations, merchants, and churches. He then goes on to study the early modern description and conception of archives by contemporaries, alternatively proud or bewildered, and sometimes profoundly skeptical before the growing masses of records. Friedrich moves beyond the standard histories of “archival science”—that is, of early manuals on archival management. He discusses a wider variety of representations, both textual and visual, arising from practical work in and with archives. The following chapters consider people and places: the archivists themselves and the other users of archives, including both readers and thieves of documents, and the means for the physical storage of documents, in buildings and furniture designed to maximize protection from fire, water, and mice (as well as thieves). Friedrich makes very perceptive points about the difficulty of using archives at the time—something any young researcher knows today. It's refreshing to see that seventeenth-century people too had troubles reading some of their contemporaries’ writing! Indeed, this led to the compilation of tools such as du Cange's glossary of medieval Latin, first published in 1678 and still in use. Friedrich is careful to discuss both the pragmatic and symbolic functions of storage sites, meant to enable, assert, and physically embody the notion of good order. The penultimate chapter discusses archives as resources for their owners: as tools of authority, means of legitimation, and evidence of family prerogatives. Finally, the book discusses the early modern uses of archives for scholarship. Not only was Ranke not the first historian to use archives, but documents were used for other purposes, such as the compilation of genealogies, crucial in the ancien régime to claim precedence or defend privileges.

Having studied at length the history of archives in late medieval and early modern Italy, I am thoroughly impressed by Markus Friedrich's work. It is based on a huge amount of scholarship in half a dozen languages and on first-hand research in some thirty archives and libraries. It covers France and Germany especially, but takes into account findings from other countries too. Friedrich cites material also to be found in the traditional syntheses by Eugenio Casanova and Adolf Brennecke, but, unlike them, he insists on practices rather than ideals. And rather than treating examples of archival malfunction as merely anecdotal, as they did, he describes archives as constructed entities made of processes of constant recirculation, reappropriation, loss, and the sometimes confusing accumulation of successive layers. In this sense, his book is more in line with another recently translated and also very useful work, Paul Delsalle's History of Archival Practice (first published 1998, translated and revised by Margaret Procter for Routledge in 2018). But unlike Delsalle, Friedrich concentrates on the early modern period: on archives as objects of the seventeenth century's social and political conflicts, on the campaigns of reordering, transcribing, and recataloging records that were attempted especially in the eighteenth century. As he shows, the modern rethinking of archives following their nineteenth-century opening had precedents already in the Enlightenment's penchant for rationalization. Readers of this journal may find that Friedrich could have given greater attention to Renaissance archives, especially in Italy, where sustained efforts to rearrange large and growing bodies of records were already ongoing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, I found the discussion illuminating and thought-provoking, and only wished Friedrich had covered even more aspects! Scholarship published since the book originally appeared has emphasized a variety of record-keeping practices outside formal storages: in notebooks, diaries, and domestic objects. Also, in a book on the history of knowledge, one would have liked to read more about the different methods for the organization, classification, and arrangement of archives. These varied radically and embodied very different views of the world: spiritual, territorial, historical, family, or person-centered. Aligning files in alphabetical order, by topic, is very different from ordering them along hierarchies of perceived importance. Nonetheless, this is an admirable attempt to write a near-total synthesis of the history of archives, from paper to premisses, people, and power. It will be of great interest for political historians, historians of scholarship, and social historians of knowledge alike.