Medieval Archives and the (Digital) Object
What is an archive? People who have a lot of experience with scholarship or in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) fields know this by instinct, but how do you explain what an archive IS to a normal person? This is where all the flowery language in the world won’t get you what you need. Scholars say:
“random, heterogeneous, and often unruly content”
“elements located at the outermost edges, defying codification, unsettling memory”
“digital objects suspended in a liquid element behind a luminous screen”
None of this would have helped me at 16 when I got my first archival job. My work was to unpack boxes, use a typewriter to do summaries of what was in those boxes, repack the papers into tidy folders and new boxes, label everything, put it away on a shelf. My job was also to sometimes help other people find the things I had put away in the boxes on the shelves. Were these materials “random, unruly, located at the edges of memory”? I didn't know. They were there and I was told to do something with them. It was only over years and years of working in archives that I came to understand what I was doing, and I could start to label that work in such a way that it could be generalized out towards my everyday life, towards anyone’s everyday life.
An archive is as small as a single person or event, as large as a nation or an eon. But at its core, it is simply the leftover things that help humans remember their past.
We say archives didn’t exist before written language. The “first” archives were the caches of cuneiform tablets in Sumeria, the rolls of papyrus in Egypt or the hieroglyphs on the walls of temples. There had to be a way, archivists agree, for knowledge to be passed across a permanent medium if we are going to call it an archive. But that distinction strikes me as silly now that I’ve worked across so many different types of formats over the years. An archive could be the verbal accounting of births and deaths across generations; it could be the story of the Iliad, if it was faithfully recounted from those were at the battle. The Old Testament, the Torah, is a kind of archive, but it existed long before there was written language to capture it on a substrate.
In the medieval period, there was not a great sense of the concept of “archives.” When I was being trained in school about archival theory (6 years after my first archival job!), we talked about ancient archives and libraries and then we sort of fast-forwarded to the Renaissance/early modern period, when European nation-states started to invest immense time, money, and labor into making sure that they could categorize and remember ALL their wealth, their subjects, their boundaries.
Does this mean that there are no archives of the medieval period? No, of course not, but the drive to collect “everything” certainly comes from the Age of Enlightenment, when people thought that if they could gather enough data, they could know anything. We are still living with this motto today, as the Internet Archive tries to know “everything” on the Web, as digital archivists rush to capture “every” Tweet or “every” piece of correspondence. The drive for “everything” is actually not that useful but since data storage costs are effectively zero we can keep living in this daydream for quite awhile longer (we are encouraged, in the digital space, to think this way: storage is free because it’s so cheap it might as well be free).
So the dream of keeping everything didn’t really exist, that I know of, in the medieval period. But medieval archives did something that no one else had ever achieved: they revolutionized what we thought a permanent medium could be. Parchment and iron gall ink completely revolutionized our ideas of permanence. More durable than papyrus or cotton paper, more flexible and portable and drop-proof than any brick or clay inscription. They could even be re-used! Scrape a parchment that has outdated information and you can start all over again! It was truly a watershed event and colored the way that medieval monks, historians, and archivists thought about their work. The early modern/modern drive to collect everything could never have come to fruition if there was not already a sense that one could collect everything in a permanent form.
Memory alone was considered “unstable” by the medieval period, often called “slippery.” Obviously most medieval people lived their day to day lives in an oral tradition but that only highlighted for them how changeable it could be. They relied on objects as symbols of authority. Orderic Vitalis, historian of the first Norman English kings, said: “without books the deeds of the ancients pass into oblivion and can in no way be recovered by us moderns, for the admonitions of the men of old pass away from the memory of the present with the changing world, as hail or snow melt in the waters of a swift river, swept away by the current, never to return.” But documents, even on parchment, don’t look very durable. No one in the medieval period would have known that the combination of parchment and iron gall ink would result in a permanence of potentially thousands of years; they had just been made! So impressive wax seals, ribbons, other accessories were added to add to the “permanence” of the document itself. Hilariously, wax seals are really fragile and fall off the parchment so easily that they definitely did very little to actually ensure validity of a document. But medieval archives were as much museums as document repositories, and all valuables were kept there. The ring used as assurance and attached to a contract, the knife used to secure a land deal, bones of saints, charters wrapped in silk to increase their prestige. So they used not only parchment but also objects to act as archives.
The broken knife of Stephen de Bulmer is still kept at the archives of the cathedral at Durham, in Yorkshire. It was an object that was given to represent the gift of land to the Church in the mid-1100s. The knife itself is the “record” but the monks added a parchment label to it with the notes of the transaction. Today we would probably say that the knife is nice and all, but it’s not a “record.” The label itself though, never got any of the usual flourishes that a charter would have: it’s not even cut in a straight shape, and has close writing on both sides. The archival object for the medieval archivist was the knife. The label was just convenience so that the archivist didn’t have to explain it every time.
Written documents, then, had to rise above the level of an impressive object in order to be thought of as official.
As time passed, the impressive charters were often copied into pages of the Gospels, both for convenience and for permanence and prestige, and from then, in the latter part of the medieval period, cartularies, grouped charters copied into books, became more common, and this is definitely closer to what we think of an archive today: a collection of documents, of records, that are written and kept together.
Up until the 12th-13th century, most written things in Europe were not for the everyday type of people, since most people couldn’t read. But there came a time in the late medieval period when everyone probably knew someone who could read, and literacy became more universal. Use of written language to codify contracts and laws would necessitate people to know how to read those if they wanted to assert their claims, and thus more people learned to read, and more people expected to read something, so governments created more writing, and it became a feedback loop.
Now that script and paper no longer dominate archives, and we’re keeping digital objects….we are looking at something much more similar to the old medieval archives again. We call digital records “objects” and think of them as packages containing meaning. The medieval experience becomes newly relevant in the digital world. Some thinkers have taken to even saying that Stephen de Bulmer’s knife is like the medieval version of blockchain: keeping a record of ownership within itself. Seems like a stretch to me, but the basic tenets of archival practice will always be the same: they are the thing that helps humans remember their past. No more and no less.
