European Archives

Presentation in French:

Confiscations d’archives et re-invention de l’Histoire en Europe entre XVIIIe et XIXe siècle

Maria Pia Donato (École normale supérieure)

Au fil des siècles, les archives ont souvent été butin de guerre et trophée de conquête. Aujourd’hui encore, en dépit des conventions internationales, de nombreuses questions liées à des archives déplacées restent ouvertes. Il est particulièrement important d’étudier ces déplacements, non seulement dans une optique patrimoniale — comme cela a souvent été le cas — mais aussi pour comprendre la nature historique des archives. La notion même d’archives, de document historique, et plus généralement le rapport au passé dans la culture européenne se re-semantisèrent profondément au tournant du XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, en partie précisément à cause des confiscations révolutionnaires et impériale, que j’essaierai d’aborder dans mon exposé en tant que processus de transfert culturel forcé.

 

Papers on the Move: Archives as Spoils in the 30 Year’s War 

Natalie Krentz (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

Archives have been taken as spoils in wars throughout history. In the early modern period, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) saw the first major wave of archives plundered and displaced. Archives of all types and sizes, from the archives of small towns and monasteries to the chancellery archives of the principalities and even the imperial archives of the Holy Roman Empire, were seized and transported throughout Europe, causing the most extensive displacement of documents until the Napoleonic era. In the last decades, research on cultural transfer has largely moved away from texts towards the study of the exchange of material objects and shown that knowledge and ideas travelled not only with texts but widely with objects such as commodities, scientific instruments, or everyday goods. Drawing from the methods of this material history approach this paper will argue that it is, however, fruitful to turn our gaze back to written materials, and consider them as material objects. Documents are by no means disembodied carriers of information, which becomes particularly clear in the looting and transport of archives in war.

The lecture will trace the routes of the documents and show how seizure and transport altered the archives and their meaning by changing the order of records and their classifications, and by incorporating documents into new ordering systems in the archives of the enemies. Finally, it will shed light on the multiple uses of the confiscated documents by the warring parties, which provide insight into the varied meanings and uses of documents and archives in the 17th century.

The seminar will be held online via Zoom. All participants have to register first using this form.