The Silences of the Archive

Historians of the early modern period work almost entirely from documents produced by institutions: courts, parishes, tax offices, trading companies. This is not a neutral inheritance. An institution records what it needs to record, and a person enters the record at the moment they become a problem, an asset or a liability to it.

[A] The consequence is a systematic distortion that is easy to state and hard to correct for. A labourer who worked steadily for forty years and troubled nobody may appear once, in a burial register, while a neighbour who was prosecuted twice generates a file. [B] Read naively, the archive therefore suggests a world of remarkable disorder. [C] Some historians have responded by reading these documents against the grain, treating a court record as evidence of ordinary life visible in the margins of the accusation rather than as a record of the accusation itself. The method has produced genuine discoveries. [D] It has also attracted the objection that a scholar who decides in advance what the silences contain will find it there, and that the technique supplies confidence rather than evidence. Both things appear to be true, which is an uncomfortable position for a discipline that would prefer a rule.