Markus Friedrich, The Birth of the Archive

Archives are the cornerstone on which historical method is built.The traditional narrative of their development focused on the nineteenth century.Yet Markus Friedrich's Birth of the Archive, first in German in 2013 and more recently light on the promising thread that Bauer excavated through Panvinio's ties with the Spanish monarchy.Bauer argues that Panvinio suffered from a lack of projection since he had "bet" on the wrong horse when dedicating some works to Philip ii of Spain, contrasting with Baronio who dedicated his research to the papacy.However, Baronio's Annales were also a political work aiming to undermine the Spanish ecclesiastical real patronato.Bauer explains in passing that Spain did not really produce a systematic answer to Protestant historiography.However, it is more probable that the historians working on behalf of the king of Spain were concerned with inter-confessional polemics among Catholic rulers who wished to extend control over ecclesiastical institutions and subjects.In addition, many church historians in the Iberian world were concerned with the Spanish king's ecclesiastical patronage in Iberian colonies instead of Catholic-Protestant controversies.Panvinio did not show much interest for these questions but it would be interesting to see how, beyond a Roman-centered perspective, Jesuit historians who were closer to the Spanish or Portuguese monarchy interpreted Panvinio's work and if their interpretation differed or not from the ones produced by Bellarmine, Canisius, and Gretser.The erudition diffused across Bauer's book is impressive and the arguments are delivered with convincing elegance.Tackling the works and the papers of early modern scholars like Panvinio is daunting, especially considering the heteroclite documents that these men generated.The logic of these scholarly archives can only be appreciated by historians today after spending infinite hours in archives.Bauer's book reads as a tribute to the heuristic power of archives, ours today and those of Panvinio during the sixteenth century.The merging of the two makes this book a joy to read

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