Archiving the Present and Chronicling for the Future in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

From the late Middle Ages until well into the nineteenth century, a remarkable number of middle-class men across Europe were chronicling current events in their communities and beyond, thus creating a hybrid type of non-institutional archive that was both local and personal. Such texts were rarely printed in the lifetimes of their authors, but they circulated in the localities and were frequently read and continued by others. Some places had a particularly strong chronicling tradition: cities such as Augsburg and Nuremberg in Germany, Bristol and Norwich in England, Valencia and Barcelona in Spain, Den Bosch and Mechelen in Brabant, or Le Puy-en-Velay and Metz in France had chroniclers in successive generations. Although chronicles did, of course, change over time, the type of information chroniclers selected for inclusion in their texts remained fairly stable, thus enabling us to study the genre across many centuries. Although thousands of early modern chronicles have survived, scholars have so far devoted surprisingly little systematic attention to the post-medieval afterlife of this genre of non-institutional local record-keeping. While medieval chronicles have, of course, been quite well studied as a genre, students of early modern historiography have long been rather dismissive of chronicles as a distinctly old-fashioned and uninteresting type of text.1 Because very few chronicles were published in print during the lifetimes of their authors, they were also easy for other intellectual historians to ignore. To students of the early modern self and emotions, on the other hand, such chronicles have often proved a disappointing read, since their authors habitually tell us very little about themselves and their feelings, and do not put the person of the author at the centre.2

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