Cœur de l'État, lieu de tension

Vivo, Filippo De

doi:10.1017/s0395264900016048

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

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Swine at the chancery and locks to chests: dispersal, destruction, and accumulation of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages

Silvestri

2021

Arch Sci

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In the last twenty years, anthropologists, archivists, and historians have dedicated increased attention to the study of archives as objects of research themselves. In so doing, scholars have predominantly examined the emergence and transformations of archives during the early modern age, focusing mostly on political and diplomatic depositories. They have tended to neglect financial archives, which is unfortunate, as—alongside judicial archives—they were probably the largest documentary repositories of the pre-modern world and those that first faced the problem of managing huge masses of documentation. This article discusses the formation and development of the Kingdom of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages, arguing that this repository evolved into a collecting archive by the early fifteenth-century, when it preserved not only the records and accounts produced by the central financial administration, but also those from a number of territorial officers and magistracies. This archival turn, I suggest, originated from the fact that the Crown of Aragon’s rulers constantly needed increased incomes to fund bureaucracies and warfare and exercise patronage, and thus needed financial information organized, at hand, and under their control. After briefly discussing the emergence of the financial archive in the thirteenth-century, this essay traces the Crown’s attempts to create a stable repository for storing financial records and accounts and its continuous struggles to prevent documentation from being scattered and dispersed. Finally, it examines the successful strategy that King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58), called the Magnanimous, pursued to organize financial documentation and concentrate records and accounts produced by financial administration into a stable building. The essay pays particular attention to the material aspects of preserving records, e.g., the restoration of buildings, construction of chests, and preparation of secure locks that were integral to the emergence of collecting archives for financial documents in the later Middle Ages.

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Swine at the chancery and locks to chests: dispersal, destruction, and accumulation of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages

Silvestri

2021

Arch Sci

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Printing Empire: Visual Culture and the Imperial Archive in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Stouraiti

2016

Hist. J.

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This article analyses the relationship between imperial expansion and popular visual culture in late seventeenth-century Venice. It addresses the impact of the military on the marketplace of print and examines the cultural importance of commercial printmaking to the visualization of colonial motifs during the 1684–99 war with the Ottoman Empire. Through a broad array of single-sheet engravings and illustrated books encompassing different visual typologies (e.g. maps, siege views, battle scenes, portraits of Venetian patricians, and representations of the Ottomans), the article re-examines key questions about the imperial dimensions of Venetian print culture and book history. In particular, it shows how warfare and colonial politics militarized the communication media, and highlights the manner in which prints engaged metropolitan viewers in the Republic's expansionist ventures. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the printing industry brought the visual spectacle of empire onto the centre stage of Venetian cultural life.

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Archival Transformations in Early Modern European History

Vivo

Guidi

Silvestri

2016

European History Quarterly

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This special issue addresses a double transformation. The first is the historical process that saw a dramatic increase in the production of documents and a substantial improvement in their management and preservation throughout Europe between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The early modern period, broadly conceived, is often described as the age of print, but it was also the great time of archives, understood as both the physical repositories and organized offices established by institutions or collectivities to store handwritten documents produced in the course of continuous functions with a view to long-term use. For many European historians, the process of centralization, expansion and (more or less successful) rearrangement of archives is symbolized by the establishment of the great Simancas and Vatican archives in 1540 and 1612 respectively. But, as the articles collected here demonstrate, smaller states also enacted reforms in record-keeping, and these changes were more concerned with archives than with central institutions. The second transformation is interpretive and methodological. Archives have long been at the centre of historians' research, but over the last ten to fifteen years, an 'archival turn' in disciplines ranging from history, literature, anthropology and the social sciences has transformed archives from sites of research into objects of enquiry in their own right. These works study the evolving processes of selection, ordering and usage that produced archives not as neutral repositories of sources but as historically constructed tools of power relations, deeply embedded in changing social and cultural contexts.The history of archives has been long practised by archivists, who are professionally aware that documents were neither produced nor arranged as

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Cœur de l'État, lieu de tension

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Swine at the chancery and locks to chests: dispersal, destruction, and accumulation of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages

Swine at the chancery and locks to chests: dispersal, destruction, and accumulation of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages

Printing Empire: Visual Culture and the Imperial Archive in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Archival Transformations in Early Modern European History

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