Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
History, Archives and the Public in Medieval and Early Modern Cities
Chair: Caroline Barron (Royal Holloway University of London)
Abstracts
Architectures of public writing in medieval civic archives
Sarah Rees-Jones (University of York)
This paper will explore the evolution and purpose of medieval civic archives in England. Previous studies have tended to focus on the legal history of civic record keeping, tracing the expanding jurisdictions and organisation of civic courts. More recently a growing interest in the cultural history of literacy and the history of the book has led to the examination of the content of civic writing and apparently pragmatic administrative records within wider cultural contexts of contemporary literary and religious writing. New discussions are emerging between literary scholars and historians about the role of reading and writing in the creation of a political secular discourse of the common good and its ethical basis in intimate and family relationships.
Central to the development not just of civic records, but of organised civic archives, were the development of ideas of secrecy and discretion in urban politics and diplomacy, and on the proper relationship between the private and public ownership of records and control of information. By the middle of the fourteenth century there was increasing concern that civic officials should deposit their official records in civic archives and that access to the information in these records should be controlled. At about the same time more complex civic registers of civic custom and history were compiled and more complex structures were built in which to house them.
This paper will explore these ideas about the developing function of public civic archives by focussing on the material contexts in which archives were located, stored and accessed. It will look at both the topographical location of civic archives within county towns (in relation to competing sources of authority), at the architecture of the buildings in which they were kept, and (where possible) at the types of furnishings provided for their storage. How did the material arrangements for the storage of public records contribute to emerging ideas about the function of literacy in creating a civic common good?
This paper arises out of a collaborative European project on medieval urban literacy led from the University of Utrecht.
Clerks, archives and history: guilds in medieval and early modern London
Matthew Davies (Centre for Metropolitan History, IHR)
Binding records: storing and retrieving information in the archives of medieval Hungarian towns
Katalin Szende (Central European University, Budapest)
The ambiguous title refers to two aspects of record management. The first part of my paper summarizes how local governments in various towns of late medieval (mid fourteenth- to early sixteenth-century) Hungary developed a system of issuing, utilizing and storing legally binding documents. I will briefly survey the role and legal force of oral testimonies, individual documents (charters) and records in book format as evidences, and place them in the context of urban society and administration.
The second part examines how the technical and material aspects of record-keeping, first of all the various techniques of (book)binding, contributed to the better preservation and retrieval of information in medieval town archives. This part will rely on a case study of the archival material in Sopron, the largest and best-preserved town archive in present day Hungary, where I have worked on a research project involving bindings. By following the general history of the town, parallel with the development of its archives and the forms of documents therein, the turning points in its pragmatic literacy can be determined and explained.
The general background and the case study reveal that the technical side of urban administration developed parallel with the growing complexity of tasks to be faced by the town governments. Furthermore, the application of new techniques contributed itself to meeting the increased demands for the preservation and retrieval of information. However, the development did not follow one straight line, but included several experiments, detours and borrowings. Hungarian towns were far from unique in this respect. In fact, the strong influences, imported ideas and other connections within medieval Hungary and outside its borders open up possibilities for comparative research on a hitherto neglected material at the crossroads of literacy, art, and urban administration.
