Finding Minority Voices in Early Modern European Archives

ABSTRACT

Since the rise of postmodernism and the archival turn in the mid-nineteen nineties with the writings of Jacques Derrida and others, much scholarship has been dedicated to the question ‘who is not represented in the archives?’ Indeed, suggested changes and alterations to traditional archival practice include the incorporation of newer models like social provenance, oral history testimonies, shared-stewardship, and community archives. While this wealth of attention and consideration towards creating more inclusive archives today are sorely needed, what can be done for archives of more distant pasts? In this article, I evaluate a number of different scholarly works which address, or demonstrate, the issue of finding minority voices in early modern archives specifically. Whether through the study of works of art, literature, or legal, government documents, these authors either find ways to breathe life into past histories once assumed to be utterly lost, or their problematic analyses uncover potential for using such methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• early modern
• minority
• race
• art
• literature

Acknowledgments

This article was originally written as a paper for Dr. Robert Riter’s Fall 2020 LS 555 course - Introduction to Archival Studies at the University of Alabama. The author thanks Professor Riter for his guidance, encouragement, and support throughout the class, as well as throughout the entirety of her archival studies at UA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Rebecca Teague is a current candidate for the Master of Library and Information Sciences degree with an Archival Concentration at the University of Alabama. She also holds a Master of Arts in Art History from the same institution. She may be contacted at [email protected] or College of Communication and Information Sciences, Box 870,172, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487.

2. This and the previous sentence refers specifically to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and much of the work of Michel Foucault, but it also has come up in more recent archival discussion with Terry Cook and others. See Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” The Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 3 (2009): 512; and Dominique Daniel, “Archival Representations of Immigration and Ethnicity in North American History: From the Ethnicization of Archives to the Archivization of Ethnicity,” Archival Science 14, no. 2 (2014): 170.

3. Discussion of the shift from respect des fonds to provenance by Terry Cook and Tom Nesmith is outlined in Jeanette Bastian, “Reading Colonial Records through an Archival Lens: The Provenance of Place, Space and Creation,” Archival Science 6, no. ¾ (2006): 279–80. Further elaboration on the topic can be found in Daniel, “Archival Representation of Immigration,” 189–92; and Laura Millar, “The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance: Archival Context in Space and Time,” Archivaria 53 (2002): 1–15.

4. See Ellen D. Swain, “Oral History in the Archives: Its Documentary Role in the 21st century,” The American Archivist 66, no. 1 (2003): 139–58. See also Ben Alexander, “Excluding Archival Silences: Oral History and Historical Absence,” Archival Science 6, no. 1 (2006): 1–11; and Laura Millar, “Subject or Object? Shaping and Reshaping the Intersections between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Records,” Archival Science 6, no ¾ (2006): 329–50.

5. Discussion of shared-stewardship is covered in Michelle Caswell, “Toward a Survivor-Centered Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse: Lessons from Community Archives,” Archival Science 14, no. ¾ (2014): 311–2; Alexander, “Excluding Archival Silences,” 1–11; and Daniel, “Archival Representation of Immigration,” 189–92.

6. For community archives, see Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream,” Archival Science 9, no. ½ (2009): 71–86; and Jimmy Zavala, Alda Migoni, Michelle Caswell, Noah Geraci, and Marika Cifor, “’A Process Where We are All at the Table:’ Community Archives Challenging Dominant Modes of Archival Practice,” Archives and Manuscripts 45, no. 3 (2017): 1–14.

7. For a look at the theological ways that Christians used their religion to exclude Muslim and Jewish peoples from history, see Kathleen Biddick, “Dead Neighbor Archives: Jews, Muslims, and the Enemies’ Two Bodies,” in Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scenes of Early Modernity, ed. Julia Reinhart Lupton and Graham Hammil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 124–42; and Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5, no. 6 (2018): 1–17. Also see Michelle Caswell, “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives,” The Library Quarterly 87, no. 3 (2017): 222–35 for a discussion about the inherent power that comes with silencing entire groups within the archives.

8. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1978).

9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247–72.

10. See Geraldine Heng, “Race and Racism in the European Middle Ages,” J. Paul Getty Trust (2019): 1; and Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 18–9.

11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1995), 75–77.

12. Heng, “Race and Racism,” 1–2.

13. For more information about the historical depiction of black people specifically in seicento Italian works, see Paul Kaplan, “Italy, 1490–1700,” Chap 2 in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the Age of Discovery to the Age of Abolition, Part 1: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010), 158–87.

14. Heng, “Race and Racism,” 3.

15. Anthony Bale, “Representing and Misrepresenting Jews in Medieval Culture,” J. Paul Getty Trust (2019): 1. Discussion of physical characteristics and examples used to denote Jews can also be found in Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 127–8.

16. Beatrice Michaelis and Elahe Haschemi Yekani, “Queering Archives of Race and Slavery – Or, on Being Wilfully Untimely and Unhappy” in Postcoloniality – Decoloniality – Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, ed. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2014), 271.

17. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 41, 75.

18. In the same city and century, French priest Fulcher of Chartres advocated for the better treatment of the pack animals who accompanied western soldiers in the First Crusade, yet this sensitivity and mercy did not extend to the innocent Moorish civilians – men, women, and children – who fell victim to slaughter by the crusaders. See Heng, The Invention of Race, 119. For the Queen of Sheba, see Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 54.

19. Vern L. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 6 (1974): 1381–94. Also see, Roland Betancourt, “Transgender Lives in the Middle Ages through Art, Literature, and Medicine,” J. Paul Getty Trust (2019): 1–10.

20. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middles Ages,” 1384–87.

21. There is one other case of male transvestitism, or cross-dressing, mentioned by Bullough, in which a group of men dressed as women entered the house of a farmer pretending to be bonae (or good people who gave presents out to the worthy in the period) and, instead, robbed the farmer and his wife in southern France in 1250. Because this cross-dressing incident was only temporary, with an ulterior motive, and does not seem to reflect any long-term understanding of identity, I have not included it.

This specific case of the little boy comes from the writings of the Frankish, 6^th-century, writer Gregory of Tours, while the quote regarding his ailment was supposedly given by his physician, Reovalis. See Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middles Ages,” 1384.

22. Mark Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany,” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 1 (2015): 34.

23. Livorno took this title from Pisa after Pisa’s port at the mouth of the Arno River began silting up in the mid-15th century. With the rise of the Medici family in the 1530s, they began looking to other Italian ports in the region for alternative locations. See Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 36–7.

24. See Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 38–9.

25. For Rosen’s discussion of William Davies, see Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 38, and note 31. For P. Filippo Bernardi da Firenze, see page 41 and note 55.

26. Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 38.

27. Ibid., 41.

28. Ibid., 44.

29. The first referenced figure comes from a well-known contemporary, Italian biographer, Baldinucci’s, Vita of the sculptor Tacca. The second, a Livornese chronicle from the Augustinian monk Mariano Santelli, who identifies Ali as the older, completely nude captive on the southwest corner of the group. See Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 47, and note 116.

30. Refer to note 22 above for William Davies and P. Filippo Bernardi da Firenze.

31. Steven Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori: The Beauty and Identity of the Slaves,” Artibus et Historiae 71 (2015): 145–80.

32. Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 39.

33. Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori,” 153.

34. Stephanie Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier: Livorno’s Turkish Bagno (1547–1747),” Mediaevalia 32 (2011): 278, 287.

35. Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori,” 153; and Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier,” 278.

36. Mark Rosen is Associate Professor and Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. See “Faculty at the School of Arts and Humanities,” School of Arts and Humanities, UT Dallas, https://www.utdallas.edu/ah/people/faculty_detail.php?faculty_id=991 (accessed November 17th, 2020). A similar view is also taken by Ann Curthoys in her consideration of the Australian history wars of the early 2000s. See Ann Curthoys, “The History of Killing and the Killing of History,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 351–73.

37. This understanding of historians and archivists as active contributors to the way the historical record is understood derives from Cook, “The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country,” 497–534.

38. Though Santelli’s chronicle is from the 18th century, it is based on earlier, 17th-century sources. See Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori,” 148, and notes 8, 19, and 38.

39. For discussion of these two sources, see Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori,” 153–4.

40. For this and the previous sentence, see Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier,” 275–324.

41. See Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier,” 295, and note 75.

42. For this and the previous sentence, see Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier,” 295–6.

43. Yet another art-centered discussion that brings to light various early modern minority groups is Tim Smith’s evaluation of the queer elements present in Il Sodoma’s Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo from 1526. Through consideration of the artist’s chosen name, his reputation, the inclusion of decapitation and missing anatomy in the painting, a famous, ancient nearby sculptural fragment, a bodily fragment (relic) of a saint located near the painting, and that saint’s own letters and chronicles, Smith makes the case for the existence of queer culture long before the modern era. See Timothy B. Smith, “Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherine’s Head,” in Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300–1600, ed. Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe (Boston MA: Brill, 2015), 169–98.

44. Christine Mason Sutherland, “Getting to Know Them: Concerning Research into Four Early Women Writers,” in Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, ed. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 28–36.

45. For this and the previous sentence, see Sutherland, “Getting to Know Them,” 29.

46. For this and the previous sentences, see Sutherland, “Getting to Know Them,” 29–30.

47. Sutherland, “Getting to Know Them,” 30.

48. Sutherland provides several excellent examples of the importance of place which, for the sake of brevity, could not be elaborated on further in the text. Another interesting anecdote worth noting, however, is the author’s story of Dame Julian of Norwich (1352–1429?), an anchoress (urban hermit) and writer who took her name from the Church of St. Julian that her small cell attached to. Though Dame Julian lived well over five hundred years ago, Sutherland explains that the anchoress is closest to her in terms of place, as Sutherland grew up in Norwich. The contemporary author’s father was born within a half-mile of St. Julian’s church and the house now built near the site belonged to a family for whom two of her grandfathers worked. Sutherland’s family actually belongs to Julian territory, and one of her close friends was named after her, while another wrote a play about her. Thus, Sutherland’s understanding of Julian of Norwich is deepened and intensified through her own connections and identifications with place. See Sutherland, “Getting to Know Them,” 32–3.

49. Christopher Dyer, “The Experience of Being Poor in Late Medieval England,” chap. 2 in Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France (New York: Routledge Press, 2012), 19–39.

50. Dyer, “The Experience of Being Poor,” 21–2.

51. This notion of archival documents possessing evidential value is inherent to Theodore Schellenberg’s ideas on primary and secondary value. See Reto Tschan, “A Comparison of Jenkinson and Schellenberg on Appraisal,” American Archivist 65, no. 2 (2002): 180.

52. Dyer, “The Experience of Being Poor,” 22.

53. Ibid.

54. A similar approach is also taken by Giovanna Benadusi in her analysis of three servant women’s final wills. Here, the author takes an in-depth look at these documents, evaluating the demands these women made of their masters against the socio-historical context of their time. For example, all three women ‘gifted’ their own money back to their masters with conditions that they do certain things in return, such as hold a memorial service in the deceased’s honor or donate a specified portion of the deceased’s money to charity. Benadusi suggests this shows the way these women could subvert the usual roles of both patriarchy and class, making the male owner subordinate to the female servant’s will by appealing to their own religious fervor and need to honor the dead. See Giovanna Benadusi, “Investing the Riches of the Poor: Servant Women and their Last Wills,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 805–26.

55. Mary Elizabeth Perry also uses the issue of naming in her evaluation of a 16th-century slave girl, Fatima, mentioned in a single Inquisition report from 1584. Much like Stephanie Nadalo, Perry reads Fatima’s brief mention against the grain through consideration of the use of specific words (her Christian name ‘Ana’ versus her Moorish-born name ‘Fatima’), history (the contemporary tension between the moriscos and the Spanish), place (Spain), and unexplained assumptions. In doing so, she provides a greater potential for understanding Fatima’s context as a woman denied a voice in the archives. See Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Finding Fatima, a Slave Woman of Early Modern Spain,” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 3–19. Also see Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2013): 412–52.

56. Lowe, “Visible Lives,” 416–7.

57. Ibid., 416.

58. Ibid., 428–9.

59. For this and the previous sentence, see Lowe, “Visible Lives,” 429–30.

60. Lowe, “Visible Lives,” 412.

61. Ibid., 447.

62. Patrick Geary, “Medieval Archivists as Authors: Social Memory and Archival Memory,” in

Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, eds. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 106–13.

63. Geary, “Medieval Archivists as Authors,” 106–13.

64. This is the case with the cartulary of Freising; the Bishop, Hitto, died over twenty years before the cartulary was finally completed. See Geary, “Medieval Archivists as Authors,” 109.

65. This is somewhat the case with the works produced by Gregory of Catena, the ‘author’ whose writing during the Investiture Controversy was likely influenced by the famous battle between the empire and the papacy. See Geary, “Medieval Archivists as Authors,” 110–1.

66. Terry Cook, “Macro-appraisal and Functional Analysis: Documenting Governance Rather than Government,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 25, no. 1 (2004): 8.

67. See Rosen, “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori,” 34–57; and Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori,” 145–80.

68. Nadalo, “Negotiating Slavery in a Tolerant Frontier,” 275–324.

69. Sutherland, “Getting to Know Them,” 28–36.

70. Dyer, “The Experience of Being Poor,” 19–39.

71. Lowe, “Visible Lives,” 412–52.

72. Geary, “Medieval Archivists as Authors,” 106–13.

73. Other great suggestions have also been put forward regarding how locations of power and agency can be repositioned by post-custodial archives theory and praxis in a case study of the University of Texas Libraries’ Human Rights Documentation Initiative. See Christian Kelleher, “Archives Without Archives: (Re)Locating and (Re)Defining the Archive Through Post-Custodial Praxis,” in “Critical Archival Studies” ed. Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017). Also see Craig M. Loftin, “Secrets in Boxes: The Historian as Archivist,” in Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, ed. Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell (New York, NY: State University of New York, 2015), 51–6.

74. Ostrow, “Pietro Tacca and his Quattro Mori,” 145–80.

75. Cook, “Macro-appraisal and Functional Analysis,” 5–18.

76. Michelle Light and Tom Hyry, “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65, no. 2 (2002): 216–30.

77. This view and understanding of the benefits of documentation strategies has been shared by Helen Samuels. See Helen Samuels, George Orwell, and Arthur Clarke, “Who Controls the Past,” The American Archivist 49, no. 2 (1986): 116–24.

78. “Blackness, Immobility & Visibility in Europe (1600–1800) – A Collaborative Timeline,” Journal18: A Journal of 18th century Art (2020), http://www.journal18.org/5175. Also see Zirwat Chowdhury, “Blackness, Immobility & Visibility in Europe: A Digital Collaboration,” Journal18: A Journal of 18th century Art (2020), http://www.journal18.org/5199.

79. See Chowdhury, “Blackness, Immobility & Visibility in Europe.”