Archives and Information in the Early Modern World

Kate Peters trained as an archivist in 1988-89 and completed a PhD in History in 1996. She has lectured in records and archives management at UCL, and in History at Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge. Her first book, Print Culture and the Early Quakers, examined the role of print in the early Quaker movement of the 1650s. She is currently working on the politics of record keeping in the English civil wars.Alexandra Walsham is a graduate of the Universities of Melbourne and Cambridge. She taught at the University of Exeter for many years before taking up her current appointment at Cambridge. She has published widely on the religious and cultural history of early modern England and her current research, supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, explores the intersections between the Reformation and generational change. She is also the Principal Investigator of the AHRC project, 'Remembering the Reformation'. She became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and was made a CBE in 2017.Liesbeth Corens is Career Development Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. She is currently completing a book manuscript on Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe for Oxford University Press. Her other project centres on creating counter-archives among Catholic minorities in early modern England and the Netherlands. With Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham, she co-edited 'The Social History of the Archives: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe', Past and Present, supplement 11 (2016).

• ForewordArchives and Information in the Early Modern WorldOrganisation and Agency1: Randolph C. Head: Early Modern European Archivality: Organised Records, Information, and State Power around 15002: Filippo de Vivo: Archival Intelligence: Diplomatic Correspondence, Information Overload, and Information Management in Italy, 1450-16503: Jacob Soll: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Accounting, and the Genesis of the State Archive in Early Modern FranceAccess and Secrecy4: Arnold Hunt: The Early Modern Secretary and the Early Modern Archive5: Arndt Brendecke: Knowledge, Oblivion and Concealment in Early Modern Spain: The Ambiguous Agenda of the Archive of Simancas6: Kate Peters: 'Friction in the Archives': Access and the Politics of Record-Keeping in Revolutionary EnglandMedia and Materiality7: Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass: The Material Culture of Record Keeping in Early Modern England8: Sundar Henny: Archiving the Archive: Scribal and Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century ZurichDocumentation and Distance9: Brooke Palmieri: Truth and Suffering in the Quaker Archives10: Sylvia Sellers-Garcia: Death, Distance, and Bureaucracy: An Archival Story11: Kiri Paramore: A Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere: The Early Modern East Asian Information OrderAfterword

it should be on the reading list of every student interested in the history of archives. Taken together with similar developments in the history of paper, diplomatic letterwriting, the news, and court history, these contributions promise to turn a history of text-as-discourse into a social history of texts as intellectual, social, and material artifacts.