M arkus F riedrich . The Birth of the Archive

In 1680 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz composed a treatise, On the Useful Institution of an Archive, in which he presented the archive as an essential component of a well-ordered bureaucracy and repository of administrative knowledge. An archive was a foundation for making policy, filled with documents establishing precedents and offering proofs. Assessing the mountains of paper with lawyerly acumen, by 1686 Leibniz concluded that archives were also good for writing history. His archival explorations, while researching the history and genealogy of the House of Hanover, deepened his appreciation of the nature of European archives in the late seventeenth century. Markus Friedrich’s The Birth of the Archive, the English translation of Die Geburt des Archivs (2013), is a well-researched and learned history of archival practices and knowledge making in early modern Europe. Friedrich opens with a 1682 case of purloined parchment from the Parisian archive of the Chambre des Comptes...

Archaeology · Art · Bureaucracy · Heresy · Parchment · Political science · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies