FRÜHNEUZEIT-IMPULSE
Schriftenreihe der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frühe Neuzeit
im Verband der Historikerinnen und Historiker Deutschlands e. V.
Band 3
Arndt Brendecke (Hg.)
PRAKTIKEN
DER FRÜHEN NEUZEIT
AKTEURE · HANDLUNGEN · ARTEFAKTE
BÖHLAU VERLAG KÖLN WEIMAR WIEN · 2015
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Inhalt
ARNDT BRENDECKE
Von Postulaten zu Praktiken. Eine Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1 Die Praxis der Theorie.
Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft im Dialog
13
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
MARIAN FÜSSEL
1.1 Praxeologische Perspektiven in der Frühneuzeitforschung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
21
FRANK HILLEBRANDT
1.2 Vergangene Praktiken. Wege zu ihrer Identifikation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
34
SVEN REICHARDT
1.3 Zeithistorisches zur praxeologischen Geschichtswissenschaft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
46
DAGMAR FREIST
1.4 Historische Praxeologie als Mikro-Historie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2 Ärztliche Praktiken (1550–1750)
62
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
MICHAEL STOLBERG
2.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
78
VOLKER HESS
2.2 Schreiben als Praktik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
82
SABINE SCHLEGELMILCH
2.3 Ärztliche Praxistagebücher der Frühen Neuzeit in praxeologischer Perspektive . . . 100
MICHAEL STOLBERG
2.4 Kommunikative Praktiken. Ärztliche Wissensvermittlung am
Krankenbett im 16. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6
Inhalt
3 Saperi. Praktiken der Wissensproduktion und Räume der Wissenszirkulation
zwischen Italien und dem Deutschen Reich im 17. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
122
SABINA BREVAGLIERI, MATTHIAS SCHNETTGER
3.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
SABINA BREVAGLIERI
3.2 Die Wege eines Chamäleons und dreier Bienen.
Naturgeschichtliche Praktiken und Räume der politischen Kommunikation zwischen
Rom und dem Darmstädter Hof zu Beginn des Dreißigjährigen Krieges . . . . . . . . 131
SEBASTIAN BECKER
3.3 Wissenstransfer durch Spionage.
Ein florentinischer Agent und seine Reise durch Nordeuropa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
KLAUS PIETSCHMANN
3.4 Musikgeschichtsschreibung im italienisch-deutschen Wissenstransfer um 1700.
Andrea Bontempis „Historia musica“ (Perugia 1695) und ihre Rezension
in den „Acta eruditorum“ (Leipzig 1696) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4 Praktiken frühneuzeitlicher Amtsträger und die Praxis der Verwaltung
. . . . . . . . . . . . 174
STEFAN BRAKENSIEK
4.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
HANNA SONKAJÄRVI
4.2 Kommissäre der Inquisition an Bord.
Schiffsinspektionen in Vizcaya ca. 1560–1680 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
ULRIKE LUDWIG
4.3 Verwaltung als häusliche Praxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
HILLARD VON THIESSEN
4.4 Gestaltungsspielräume und Handlungspraktiken frühneuzeitlicher Diplomaten . . . . 199
CORINNA VON BREDOW
4.5 Gestaltungspotentiale in der Verwaltungspraxis der niederösterreichischen
Kreisämter 1753–1799 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Inhalt
BIRGIT EMICH
4.6 Handlungsspielräume, Netzwerke und das implizite Wissen der Beamten.
Kommentar zur Sektion „Praktiken frühneuzeitlicher Amtsträger und
die Praxis der Verwaltung“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
5 Religiöse Praxis im Exil
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
JUDITH BECKER, BETTINA BRAUN
5.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
JUDITH BECKER
5.2 Praktiken der Gemeindebildung im reformierten
Exil des 16. Jahrhunderts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
TIMOTHY FEHLER
5.3 Armenfürsorge und die Entwicklung der Informations- und
Unterstützungsnetzwerke in und zwischen reformierten Exilgemeinden . . . . . . . . 245
BETTINA BRAUN
5.4 Englische katholische Inseln auf dem Kontinent:
Das religiöse Leben englischer Exilnonnen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . 256
6 Materielle Praktiken in der Frühen Neuzeit
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
DAGMAR FREIST
6.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
BENJAMIN SCHMIDT
6.2 Form, Meaning, Furniture: On Exotic Things, Mediated Meanings,
and Material Practices in Early Modern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
CONSTANTIN RIESKE
6.3 All the small things: Glauben, Dinge und Glaubenswechsel im Umfeld
der Englischen Kollegs im 17. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
LUCAS HAASIS
6.4 Papier, das nötigt und Zeit, die drängt übereilt. Zur Materialität und
Zeitlichkeit von Briefpraxis im 18. Jahrhundert und ihrer Handhabe . . . . . . . . . . . 305
7
8
Inhalt
ANNIKA RAAPKE
6.5 Dort, wo man Rechtsanwälte isst.
Karibische Früchte, Sinneserfahrung und die Materialität des Abwesenden . . . . . . 320
7 Praktiken der römischen Bücherzensur im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
ANDREEA BADEA
7.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
MARGHERITA PALUMBO
7.2 „Deve dire il Segretario che li sono stati accusati…“.
Die vielfältigen Wege der Anzeige an die Indexkongregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
ANDREEA BADEA
7.3 Über Bücher richten? Die Indexkongregation und ihre Praktiken der
Wissenskontrolle und Wissenssicherung am Rande gelehrter Diskurse . . . . . . . . . . 348
BERNWARD SCHMIDT
7.4 Was ist Häresie?
Theologische Grundlagen der römischen Zensurpraxis in der Frühen Neuzeit . . . 361
MARCO CAVARZERE
7.5 The Workings of a Papal Institution. Roman Censorship and Italian Authors in
the Seventeenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
8 Can you hear the light?
Sinnes- und Wahrnehmungspraktiken in der Frühen Neuzeit
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
DANIELA HACKE, ULRIKE KRAMPL, JAN-FRIEDRICH MISSFELDER
8.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
CLAUDIA JARZEBOWSKI
8.2 Tangendo. Überlegungen zur frühneuzeitlichen Sinnes- und
Emotionengeschichte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
HERMAN ROODENBURG
8.3 Pathopoeia von Bouts bis Rembrandt, oder:
Wie man die Gefühle der Gläubigen durch ihre Sinne beeinflussen kann . . . . . . . . 405
Inhalt
DANIELA HACKE
8.4 Contact Zones. Überlegungen zum sinneshistorischen Potential
frühneuzeitlicher Reiseberichte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
ULRIKE KRAMPL
8.5 Akzent. Sprechen und seine Wahrnehmung als sensorielle Praktiken des Sozialen.
Situationen aus Frankreich im 18. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
JAN-FRIEDRICH MISSFELDER
8.6 Der Krach von nebenan.
Klangräume und akustische Praktiken in Zürich um 1800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447
PHILIP HAHN
8.7 Sinnespraktiken: ein neues Werkzeug für die Sinnesgeschichte?
Wahrnehmungen eines Arztes, eines Schuhmachers, eines Geistlichen und
eines Architekten aus Ulm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 458
9 Archival Practices.
Producing Knowledge in early modern repositories of writing
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
MARKUS FRIEDRICH
9.1 Introduction: New perspectives for the history of archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 468
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
9.2 Archival practice and the production of political knowledge
in the office of Sir Francis Walsingham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473
RANDOLPH C. HEAD
9.3 Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur:
the genealogy and implications of Innsbruck registries, 1523–1565 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485
MEGAN WILLIAMS
9.4 Unfolding Diplomatic Paper and Paper Practices in Early Modern Chancellery
Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 496
10 Praktiken des Verhandelns
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509
CHRISTIAN WINDLER
10.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509
9
10
Inhalt
RALF-PETER FUCHS
10.2 Normaljahrsverhandlung als dissimulatorische Interessenvertretung . . . . . . . . . . . 514
MATTHIAS KÖHLER
10.3 Argumentieren und Verhandeln auf dem Kongress von Nimwegen (1676–79) . . . 523
TILMAN HAUG
10.4 Zweierlei Verhandlung? Zur Dynamik „externer“ und „interner“
Kommunikationspraktiken in den Beziehungen der französischen Krone
zum Alten Reich nach 1648 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 536
CHRISTINA BRAUNER
10.5 Ehrenmänner und Staatsaffären. Rollenvielfalt in der Verhandlungspraxis
europäischer Handelskompanien in Westafrika . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 548
NADIR WEBER
10.6 Praktiken des Verhandelns – Praktiken des Aushandelns.
Zur Differenz und Komplementarität zweier politischer Interaktionsmodi
am Beispiel der preußischen Monarchie im 18. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 560
JEAN-CLAUDE WAQUET
10.7 Kommentar zur Sektion „Praktiken des Verhandelns“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571
11 Praktiken der Heuchelei?
Funktionen und Folgen der Inkonsistenz sozialer Praxis
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578
TIM NEU, MATTHIAS POHLIG
11.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578
THOMAS WELLER
11.2 Heuchelei und Häresie. Religiöse Minderheiten und katholische
Mehrheitsgesellschaft im frühneuzeitlichen Spanien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585
NIELS GRÜNE
11.3 Heuchelei als Argument. Bestechungspraktiken und Simoniedebatten im
Umfeld von Bischofswahlen der Frühen Neuzeit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596
BIRGIT NÄTHER
11.4 Systemadäquate Artikulation von Eigeninteressen: Zur Funktion von
Heuchelei in der frühneuzeitlichen bayerischen Verwaltung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
Inhalt
TIM NEU
11.5 „nicht in Meinung das […] etwas neuwes eingeführt werde“.
Heuchelei und Verfassungswandel im frühen 17. Jahrhundert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619
12 Praktiken des Entscheidens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 630
BARBARA STOLLBERG-RILINGER
12.1 Zur Einführung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 630
BIRGIT EMICH
12.2 Roma locuta – causa finita?
Zur Entscheidungskultur des frühneuzeitlichen Papsttums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635
ANDRÉ KRISCHER
12.3 Das Gericht als Entscheidungsgenerator.
Ein englischer Hochverratsprozess von 1722 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 646
GABRIELE HAUG-MORITZ
12.4 Entscheidung zu physischer Gewaltanwendung.
Der Beginn der französischen Religionskriege (1562) als Beispiel . . . . . . . . . . . . . 658
MATTHIAS POHLIG
12.5 Informationsgewinnung und Entscheidung.
Entscheidungspraktiken und Entscheidungskultur der englischen
Regierung um 1700 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 667
PHILIP HOFFMANN-REHNITZ
12.6 Kommentar zur Sektion „Praktiken des Entscheidens“ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 678
13 Die Ökonomie sozialer Beziehungen
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 684
DANIEL SCHLÄPPI
13.1 Die Ökonomie sozialer Beziehungen. Forschungsperspektiven hinsichtlich
von Praktiken menschlichen Wirtschaftens im Umgang mit Ressourcen . . . . . . . . 684
14 Fachgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696
JUSTUS NIPPERDEY
14.1 Die Institutionalisierung des Faches Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit . . . . . . . . . . . 696
11
RANDOLPH C. HEAD
9.3 Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur:
the genealogy and implications of Innsbruck registries, 1523–15651
In organizing and reorganizing archival collections, modern archivists generally
follow the principle of provenance, which rests on two assertions: first, that bodies
of records naturally and organically reflect the organizations and processes that
produced them; and second, that the resulting arrangement of records should be
retained as they move to different repositories, even if the purpose of retention
changes.2 This paper investigates practices in early modern Europe that predated
the theory of provenance, and argues that early modern registry (Registratur)
in particular directly contributed to the theory’s emergence. Like other ways of
thinking about records from the past, such as Mabillonian diplomatics and the
ius archivi of the eighteenth century, provenance as an explicit theory developed
in the nineteenth-century as an interpretation of record-keeping practices of
the early modern period, practices that depended closely on the consolidation
of the administrative state.3 Understanding those earlier practices, therefore,
makes it clear that we should not naturalize provenance as universal principle,
but rather understand it as a culturally-inflected approach to understanding
and managing repositories in a particular tradition, namely the recordkeeping
of early modern European states.
Dutch and North German archival traditions of Registratur – the name given
to the region’s distinctive approach to managing and arranging state records –
were an important precursor of the category of provenance, which became to
1
2
3
The author wishes to thank the University of California Academic Senate and the Newberry
Library/National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided funding for research;
the staff of the Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck, especially Dr. Christoph Haidacher, who
enabled additional research despite restricted archive hours; and Mr. Kyle Stevenson for
assistance with preparing the manuscript.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century archival science made abundant use of metaphors of
naturalness and organicism in describing the principle of provenance. A typical exam
ple, appears in Ludwig Bittner’s introduction to the published inventory to the Viennese
Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv: Bittner, Ludwig: Gesamtinventar des Wiener Haus-, Hof- und
Staatsarchivs, aufgebaut auf der Geschichte des Archivs und seiner Bestände. 5 Vols. Vienna
1936–1940, e.g., p. 10.
For more on this connection, see my article: Head, Randolph C.: Documents, archives
and proof around 1700, in: The Historical Journal 56 (2013), pp. 909–30.
486 Randolph C. Head
central to European archival theory and practice in the nineteenth century. 4 The
most widely known form of Registratur is the Prussian Sachaktenregistratur.5
Scrutinizing registry practices in European chancelleries of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries is thus a vital step in understanding both how practitioners
and later thinkers conceptualized records management. The practices involved
in recordkeeping at every level deserve scrutiny, from the scribal practices of
clerks (which remained relatively stable), to increasingly bureaucratized practices of decision-making, to practices of governance as an evolving game among
power players. This paper will concentrate on the sophisticated serial registry
that crystallized in the new Innsbruck Hofkanzlei around 1565. I will argue that
the combination of codex-based recordkeeping in sixteenth-century Innsbruck
with the architecture of the Habsburg system of dominion shaped the emergence
of Registratur there in a way distinct from both the Amtsbuchregistraturen of
urban administrations and the Prussian Sachaktenregistratur. Understanding a
wider range of early modern registry practices helps illuminate how the theory
of provenance emerged from them.
My approach here builds on Joachim Lehmann’s observation forty years ago
that we must question which late medieval modes of record compilation lay behind
the Registratur of the seventeenth century and beyond, rather than assuming
a straightforward trajectory from late medieval chancelleries to early modern
registries to modern archival science.6 The timing and the political-administrative
context of different registries’ emergence left indelible traces in the practices
they adopted. The Innsbruck case, I argue, helps us see that the pathway from
medieval registers to early modern records management had multiple branches
that recombined existing practices in different ways, thus revealing the conceptual
horizons of the actors involved. I am therefore convinced that we need to enrich
and revise the Aktenkunde launched by Heinrich Otto Meisner and Johannes
4
5
6
The practices that underlie theories of provenance clearly reflected certain forms of social
and political organization that extended far beyond early governmentality, but I argue that
the specific pathway from registry (Registratur) to the theory of provenance is closely tied
to the exercise of dominion, and only later colonized other bodies of documents.
The seminal contribution of the archival manual of Müller, Feith and Fruin to the concept of provenance, which integrally linked provenance to a Registraturprinzip, drew on
long-standing Dutch and German practices and the archival science that was emerging
in interaction with them. For a brief introduction, see: Ridener, John: From Polders to
Postmodernism. A Concise History of Archival Theory. Duluth 2008. Ridener draws heavily
on the work of Eric Ketelaar and his students.
Lehmann, Joachim: Registraturgeschichtliche und quellenkundliche Aspekte älterer Kanzleiregister, in: Archivmitteilungen 26/1 (1976), pp. 13–18; Ernst Pitz’s seminal study, Schriftund Aktenwesen der städtischen Verwaltung im Spätmittelalter. Köln – Nürnberg – Lübeck.
Cologne 1959, raises similar issues explicitly in the context of urban Amtsbuchregistraturen.
Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur
Papritz after the war, and recently reinvigorated by Jürgen Kloosterhuis and
Michael Hochedlinger, in order to fully understand the processes involved.7
9.3.1 Defining Registry
The German term Registratur is polysemic, applying equally to institutions for
records management and the bodies of records and finding aids that such institutions generated. Deriving from the ubiquitous older term ‘register’, Registratur
came ultimately to designate the entire management of governmental records
between the chancellery and the archive.8 In Cornelia Vissman’s words, “Around
1600, registries that hitherto had acted as specially designated keys to specific
little treasure boxes start turning into independent agencies that connected records, their users, and the chancery personnel. The registry was an interim zone
in which circulating records turned into recorded files.”9
In a way, the emergence of registries as distinct offices formalized practices
for dealing with the material that accumulated ad hoc in chancelleries, separately
from treasury-archives of older charters stored in some sacral location: registry
and archive thus helped define each other’s boundaries as both crystallized after
1400.10 In the nineteenth century, material from both registries and the archival
treasuries reconverged to produce the modern heterogeneous state archive. The
emergence of the registry as a distinct institution between these endpoints – as
cannot be emphasized enough – corresponded closely to changing modes of
administration that increasingly relied on written records to conduct diplomacy
and to administer subjects and territories. For the early modern period, registry
can be defined as: assemblages of administrative structures and practices dedicated to managing documents and the information in them, with the resulting
records organized in ways that privileged the internal processes of the producing
7
8
9
10
Meisner, Heinrich O.: Urkunden- und Aktenlehre der Neuzeit. Leipzig 1950; id.: Aktenkunde:
Ein Handbuch für Archivbenützer, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Brandenburg-Preußens.
Berlin 1935; Papritz, Johannes: Neuzeitliche Methoden der archivischen Ordnung (Schriftgut
vor 1800), in: Archivum 14 (1964), pp. 13–56; Kloosterhuis, Jürgen: Amtliche Aktenkunde
der Neuzeit. Ein hilfswissenschaftliches Kompendium, in: Archiv für Diplomatik 45 (1999),
pp. 465–563; Hochedlinger, Michael: Aktenkunde: Urkunden- und Aktenlehre der Neuzeit.
Vienna/Munich 2009.
On the evolution of the terms, see: Hochedlinger, Aktenkunde, p. 61.
Vismann, Cornelia: Files. Law and Media Technology. Palo Alto 2008, p. 97.
Pitz, Schrift- und Aktenwesen, p. 467.
487
488 Randolph C. Head
actors, and intentionally held accessible to support administrative and political
decision-making by rulers and their agents.11
This definition helps clarify the difference between medieval registers and
early modern registries (viewed as recordkeeping protocols): the latter always
gathered heterogeneous records, usually including some internal to a political
body, some arriving from its subjects and from other polities, and some it emitted,
whether these were charters, letters, or belonged to other genres. This heterogeneity, together with the growing volume of documents in circulation, had the
consequence that the material found in any registry increasingly required the
context of other records to become effectively meaningful.12 In contrast to the
idealized self-definition of the classical Urkunde, the files of European registries
were thus explicitly contextual. Files were also conceptualized as a resource for
administration as much as an armoury for litigation, useful if they could be
connected to future contexts of contestation.13
An emergent characteristic of registries was that they increasingly organized
material according to administrative entities or processes, rather than according
to content (here lies one root of the later idea of provenance). Two other features
characterized early modern registries (especially in their Germanic versions) as
they became a systematized practice. First, registries provided spaces for all documents (at least, potentially) that arose in the course of administrative governance.
No matter what a transaction involved, its Sachakte had a place in the larger
Aktenplan of the Prussian registry, or its individual records in the serial storage
11
12
13
This definition draws most directly on Hochedlinger, Aktenkunde, p. 22: “Als Registratur
bezeichnet man […] jene Abteilung oder jenen Ort einer Behörde usw., an dem das im
Geschäftsgang erwachsene Schriftgut in einem bestimmten Ordnungszusammenhang
verwaltet und abgelegt wird, um für die laufenden Geschäften benützbar zu bleiben.”
As is common in much of archival theory, Hochedlinger’s definition comprises both the
institution and the place (“Abteilung […]einer Behörde” as well as “Ort”).
In this, they are a specific site for a general process proposed by Simon Teuscher: Teuscher,
Simon: Document collections, mobilized regulations, and the making of customary law
at the end of the Middle Ages, in: Archival Science 10 (2010), pp. 210–230; and more comprehensively in: id.: Erzähltes Recht. Frankfurt a. M. 2007.
The terminology here from Bautier, Robert-Henri: La phase cruciale de l’histoire de le
archivistique, in: Archivum 18 (1968), pp. 139–149. In this, registries accelerated but also
changed the dynamic of desemiosis, transsemiosis, and resemiosis that characterizes all
practices of document storage. See the introduction to Hildbrand, Thomas: Herrschaft,
Schrift und Gedächtnis. Das Kloster Allerheiligen und sein Umgang mit Wissen in Wirtschaft,
Recht und Archiv (11.–16. Jahrhundert). Zurich 1996 for an analysis of and argument for
these terms.
Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur
of the Austrian system.14 A second critical feature of registries is that they were
conceived and oriented toward future transactions: registries built on on-going
practices for managing records, which set them apart from the retrospective
focus that characterized many early projects of archival organization.
9.3.2 The Innsbruck Hofregistratur after 1564
A sophisticated registry emerged in Innsbruck in 1564, drawing on both local
and Viennese antecedents. The rupture in the Austrian Habsburg succession
on the death of Ferdinand I in 1564, during which his sons divided his realms
into three segments, provided the new Tyrolean Archduke Ferdinand’s adminis
trators with the opportunity to transform the tools they knew from Innsbruck,
Vienna and Prague into a new system. The result was a distinctive corpus built
by well-defined practices, the so-called Hofregistratur,15 that operated without
interruption until 1667 and whose principles continued to shape Austrian registry
practice into the twentieth century.16
Several earlier systems contributed to the Hofregistratur. The powerful codex-based record-keeping systems established in Innsbruck during the 1520s
provided one key source of practices for the Hofregistratur. Of vital importance
is that Innsbruck practice in the mid-sixteenth century relied on the seriality
of the codex not just for its material form, but also for its logic. The Innsbruck
copybook series protocolled and indexed diverse genres of communications
and decisions coming into or going out of the regional chancellery after 1523.
In particular, two special book-series covered correspondence from or to the
14
15
16
Miller, Thea: The German Registry. The Evolution of a Recordkeeping Model, in: Archival Science 3 (2003), pp. 43–63 (here 51) cites a revealing clause an 18th century Prussian
administrative manual that instructs each Registrator “to think of the registry assigned to
him as a whole,” and to “identify the principle concept of this whole, and check to see if
the divisions which have been made are genuine constituents of this concept.”
The Hofregistratur had shifting names from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries.
Otto Stolz proposed calling this particular corpus the Hofregistratur: Stolz, Otto: Archivund Registraturwesen der oberösterreichischen (tirolisch-schwäbischen) Regierung im
16. Jahrhundert, in: Archivalische Zeitschrift 42/43 (1934), pp. 81–136, here p. 105, pointing
out that the term was already in circulation in Maximilian I’s time. The materials in the
Hofregistratur were substantially reorganized in the 1990s according to very granular principles of provenance and are now described in Beimrohr, Wilfried: Das Tiroler Landesarchiv
und seine Bestände. Innsbruck 2002 pp. 87–88 under the designation Landesfürstlichen
Kanzleien: Oberösterreichischer Hofrat.
The system is described in great detail in Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen, pp. 107–113.
I have worked with the early volumes in the series to examine the indexing principles.
Tiroler Landesarchiv [=TLA], Hofregistratur/Hofrat, Journale/Protokolle, Einkommene
Schriften, Series R, vol. 1; Einkommene Schriften, Series K, vol. 25; Konzeptbücher, Series
R, vol. 49; Konzeptbücher, Series K, vol. 73 (all from 1564 to 1566.)
489
490 Randolph C. Head
usually distant sovereign, and were thus ordered according to decision-making
pathways rather than by content or pertinence.17 The Innsbruck copybooks represent a particularly well-articulated example of the expansion of late medieval
registers to cover informational records of multiple types, and continued to be
produced throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The new Innsbruck court chancellery also drew on Viennese antecedents as
it began business. As Archduke Ferdinand acceded to the Tyrol under the terms
of his father’s testament, masses of documents were redistributed to reflect the
new organization of the Austrian lands. A substantial body of loose documents
from Vienna, gathered chronologically into bundles dating from 1528 to 1564,
found its way to Innsbruck, and may have provided a second impetus for the
Hofregistratur.18 The practice of collecting drafts of outgoing documents and
originals of incoming material was already described in the Vienna chancellery
ordinance of 1526: several categories of documents were to be gathered monthly
into bundles, while the secretaries were to record their key points in memory
books (Gedenkbücher), along with notes on oral transactions.19
On his accession, Archduke Ferdinand appointed a court chancellor to manage his Tyrolean affairs, who proceeded to found the new court chancellery
and Hofregistratur. The latter did not cover the entire Innsbruck administration:
rather, as its name suggests, it was the registry of Archduke Ferdinand II’s own
court (Hof), whose chancellery communicated with the separate chancelleries
17
18
19
The context of an itinerant emperor and archduke communicating constantly with several
central chancelleries left a deep mark on Austrian chancellery practice: from the early
1520s, each administrative center kept serial records of this correspondence as a separate
corpus from the recordkeeping on local administration. Notably, this corpus was serial
but not based on a fixed schedule, in contrast to the famous Jesuit annual letters analyzed
in Friedrich, Markus: Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im
Jesuitenorden 1540–1773. Frankfurt a. M. 2011. The different communicative context led
to different archival strategies.
Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen, p. 105. On p.108, Stolz notes that the fascicles of
documents now found in Innsbruck are products of the nineteenth-century: the basic
unit of storage and management before that was the monthly bundle, each of which had
a cover sheet on which the series, month and year appeared in large calligraphic script.
The terms Gedenkbuch and Gedächtnisbuch both appear. I rely on Stolz, Archiv- und
Registraturwesen, pp. 105–106, for the Vienna materials. Stolz reports that none of these
Vienna memory books or the associated bundles survive in Vienna. Innsbruck archivists
have speculated that similar bundling and storage took place in Innsbruck after 1523, but
no such bundles from the critical period 1523–1564 survive (cf. Beimrohr, Das Tiroler
Landesarchiv, p. 70). It is not clear, however, why retention would have seemed important
in the first place for the Tirol administration, seeing that all important documents were
copied into the massive codex copybooks started in 1523 (which appears to have distinguished the Innsbruck administration from the Viennese, where storage of documents and
recording of metadata in the Gedächtnisbücher was the preferred approach).
Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur
for the administration of the Vorlande to the west, and with Vienna, Prague,
Graz, Milan and other Habsburg centres. In this respect, the new structure reproduced Innsbruck’s place in the Habsburg composite monarchy, linked to a
separate imperial court chancellery that corresponded with various regional
chancelleries. The documents that circulated through the new Hofkanzlei were
extremely diverse in nature: they included diplomatic correspondence, correspondence on Habsburg family affairs, commands and reports from the regional
administrations, and personal affairs of the Archduke and his court, right down
to the purchase of English hunting dogs for his amusement.
The system that the new Hofkanzlei established to manage loose records
shows clearly that the secretaries’ goal was to know about and have easy access
to every document that reached them (whether from the territorial chancelleries
in Innsbruck, from subjects, from other Habsburg centres, or from anyone else),
and also of every document sent out in the Archduke’s name. To achieve this goal,
they recombined elements from the existing Innsbruck copybook system and
from the Viennese system of bundling documents and recording their contents
in a Gedenkbuch. Unlike the older Innsbruck copybooks, into which secretaries
copied important incoming and outgoing documents, the Hofregistratur was
built around preserving and accessing the actual documents. In contrast to the
flexible Viennese Gedenkbücher, however, the new journals were organized as
strictly chronological protocols that closely mirrored the arrangements of the
documents in storage, and that were provided with detailed alphabetical indexes
managed according to Innsbruck indexing practices.
Both the Viennese and Innsbruck practices that the Hofkanzlei adopted went
beyond High Medieval practices and thus may be considered true registries
(Registraturen), as the Habsburgs’ own designations suggest. They made heterogeneous documents (well beyond formal proof-records) accessible to support
decision-making; they were organized according to the flow of documents rather
than according to their contents; and they were capacious, open-ended and
designed for continuous additions. At the same time, the continuity of media
technologies and decision-making practices during the Hofregistratur’s evolution
out of existing practices left deep traces in its organizational logic and practical
operation. Notably, the system’s reliance on the codex form and the technologies that made it so effective (foliation, rubrication, alphabetical indexing)
helps explain the dominance of linear chronological order in both the storage
of documents and the construction of finding-aids (though, as we shall see, exceptions to this logic emerged very early in the Hofregistratur’s operation). The
adaptation of the Viennese bundle-and-Gedenkbuch approach, meanwhile, helped
free metadata from documents, allowing the production of denser finding aids
for placement in the chancellery, while the bulky documents could accumulate
in separate repositories.
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492 Randolph C. Head
A closer examination reveals that the Hofregistratur was not only built on
sixteenth-century chancellery practices, but was ultimately also limited by them.
At the heart of the Hofregistratur lay an elegant linkage between structures for
storage and finding, on the one hand, and processes of registration and management on the other. Despite the heterogeneous genres of documents it included,
the Hofregistratur divided them into only two major categories – one for political matters, the other for fiscal affairs – which in turn were divided only into
incoming and outgoing chronological series. Documents in each of the four
resulting series were stored in monthly bundles, with documents placed by the
date of their issue.20 For incoming documents, the Innsbruck Hofkanzlei sent
the original document to storage once it had been dealt with by the Archduke’s
court and had been journaled and indexed. For outgoing documents, it was
the chancellery’s final draft (the Konzept) that went to storage after the actual
emitted charter or letter was complete. This meant that adjacent documents in
the main series usually had no connection to one another, since only their date
determined their position (as had been the case in the Innsbruck serial copybooks
that preceded the Hofregistratur). The practice of journaling each document by
date, meanwhile, meant that entries in the journals mirrored the sequence of
the stored records: the journals thus served as a browsable inventory as well as
an indexed protocol to the separate documents in storage.
The journals’ indexes provided the primary way to access and identify documents for later use. Indexing allowed users to move from a category of action or
actor that they were interested in to a document summary, which could reveal
what was involved and whether retrieving the document was worthwhile. If it
was, the journal, mirroring the repository, also provided information about a
document’s location. The summaries in the journals were concise – typically
three to four entries per quarto page in the journals – and occupied only the
right-hand section of each page; in the left-hand section, keywords (rubrics)
identified the document’s main matters and actors. Each journal entry typically
had several keywords, which then appeared in the volume’s index. Just beneath
each entry was information on where the document was located. In many cases,
this information consisted simply of the document’s date (sometimes with the
abbreviation G.M., for Gemeine Missive), which was sufficient to identify the
monthly bundle and position. Other documents, however, had a special ‘rubric’
category next to the date: such documents did not take their places in the main
series, but were rather extracted and placed in sub-series dedicated to specific
20
The sorting into series was according to a Vermerk or annotation made by the chancellery’s
Registrator, on the top or back of each document. For incoming documents, the date
was that of the document’s production, not the date it was received in Innsbruck by the
chancellery. Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen, p. 108.
Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur
topics. This practice points to the limits of the system’s chronological logic, which
was implicit in book-form registry, but became increasingly problematic for a
loose-document registry as its repository grew.
Naturally, this entire system did not take shape overnight in 1564. The names
of the journal volumes, the number of series (originally five, not four) and other
details took several years to work out.21 A few early journal volumes actually carry
the title Gedenkbuch, used in Vienna since 1526, helping confirm the influence
of Vienna practices in establishing the Hofregistratur.22 Once fully established,
though, the system operated largely without interruption through the following
archducal reigns. It is worth noting how labour-intensive such a registry was. In
Innsbruck, every document had to be analysed, journaled, indexed, and placed
in the right sequence. Ferdinand’s Hofkanzlei employed a dozen men, including
a chancellor, four secretaries, and seven scribes, to keep up with this work – all
in addition to the Tyrolean territorial chancellery.23
In addition to the costs involved and the challenges of storing the rapidly
accumulating bundles, certain features of this system began undermining its
efficiency from the outset.24 The first problem arose from the use of rubrics to
separate groups of documents from the main series of gemeine Missiven, which
were ordered chronologically.25 Although journaled and indexed with the main
series, the documents involved were stored as separate groups, breaking the
otherwise comprehensive mirroring between journals and storage. Aside from
the mechanics of managing the growing complexity of the document bundles
this caused, the rubrics thus undermined the coherence of the chronological
system. The rubrics themselves were heterogeneous, including domains and
places, people, events, areas of governmental action, and others. As Otto Stolz
notes, “These show no signs of a planned and systematic principle of division,
but were only chosen from time to time according to need; once they had been
21
22
23
24
25
The fifth series, for outgoing general missives, existed only in 1566 and 1567, after which
four series of documents and journals were again maintained. See: TLA, Repertorium B342,
pp. 36–37; I rely on my own observations of the series and volume names as recorded in
various locations, as well.
Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen, p. 109, discussing the changing terminology.
Ibid, pp. 85–86, describes the personnel in Innsbruck. The regional chanceries for the
Tyrol, which continued to operate the copybooks mentioned above, had an even larger
staff.
The travails of the accumulated documents are traced in Beimrohr, Wilfried: Die Ehemalige
Hofregistratur. Ein Überblick, (msc. 1996), TLA, Repertorium B 701/1–13.
See Beimrohr, Das Tiroler Landesarchiv, p. 100; Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen,
pp. 108–109. TLA, Repertorium 701/7, p. 3, describes the process, using the term Betreff
akten, ‘topical files’, which is more accurate than calling this material a Sachaktenregistratur,
since the rubrics identified topics rather than specific transactions. There were eventually
some 186 special rubrics, according to Beimrohr’s careful count.
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established, however, they were preserved.”26 In effect, the material gathered
under rubrics formed a separate, content-oriented registry of its own. Although
still tracked through the journals, the proliferation of unsystematic rubric categories meant that documents became more burdensome to find and easier
to misfile at their return to storage. By 1667, the disorder was sufficient that a
special adjunct registrator had to draft a new systematic index for the material
held under rubrics.27
The rigidity of the Hofregistratur’s chronological structure and the resulting
proliferation of journal volumes became a second obstacle as the system continued in operation. Searching the journals in the 1570s would have been easy,
since only a few existed in each series; thirty years later, the same search might
involve searching the indexes of forty or more journals in both incoming and
outgoing series. Lacking anything like a card catalogue, searching grew ever
more burdensome as the system continued to operate.28 Finally (and unlike the
later Prussian Sachakte), the Innsbruck Registratur provided no way to include documents produced during internal deliberations within the court, which
represented an important new genre of document in the early modern period.
Only incoming and outgoing documents were journaled.
Still, the Hofregistratur represents an impressive and innovative cultural product. Building on the codex-based practices they had already developed to manage
governance with an itinerant sovereign, the officials in the new Innsbruck Hofkanzlei used the opportunity to create a machine for managing documents that
their archduke and his council could use in the process of governing. This system
rested on a strikingly systematic chronological storage of documents, together
with coherent metadata in book form that allowed individual loose documents to
be located, at least in theory, with great precision.29 Notably, this comprehensive
system needed neither new media nor new technologies to operate: the codex,
the bundle, and the alphabetical index were already familiar and well-honed
tools in Vienna and Innsbruck, as they were across sixteenth-century Europe.
26
27
28
29
Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen, p. 109, with a full list of the rubrics on p. 116.
In particular, there was a tendency for documents from the chronological series to wander into the rubrics, rendering the journal indexes incorrect. On filing problems, Stolz,
Archiv- und Registraturwesen, p. 113; on the 1667 reorganization, p. 109.
In Stolz’s words, “Da muß man oft ziemlich viele Jahresrepertorien durchsehen und die
entsprechenden Bündel öffnen, um alle einzelnen Akten zu finden, welche über eine
bestimmte Angelegenheit handeln.” Stolz, Archiv- und Registraturwesen, p. 113.
The management of loose documents as they proliferated was one of the greatest challenges
to all late medieval and early modern chancelleries. Varied responses emerged, most of
them heavily reliant on deploying practices enabled by the technologies of the codex.
Structure and practice in the emergence of Registratur
9.3.3 Conclusions
To study archives is to study two things at once: the collections of records that
describe events, actions and ideas in the past, and simultaneously one of the critical
tools for conducting historical research in the first place. The order in which we
encounter historical records, the finding aids (contemporary and modern) and
the published guides that help us use them are themselves both products of and
tools for historical research. In consequence, the history of archives imposes on
its researchers an unavoidable duality of perspective – immanent, perhaps, in
all uses of surviving texts to elucidate the past, but here explicit and an integral
part of the task of understanding archives as historical phenomena. We all use
archives shaped by a century of management according to the principles of provenance and respect des fonds; but when we study the history of those archives,
those modern principles can become a conceptual veil that as easily obscures
as well as reveals how each archive evolved. In this paper, I have sought to show
how close attention to specific practices can help us understand both the con
struction of particular repositories and finding tools as they existed in the past,
and how past practices shaped the conceptual terrain on which later archivists
stood as they created both the archives that we now use and archival science that
continues to guide their arrangement.
495