Rethinking the archive in pre-modern Europe: family archives and their inventories from the 15th to the 19th centuries

“When and why such inventories were created; how they select, organize, expand, and shape the contents of the archives that they purport to inventory; their strategies of inclusion and exclusion; the dynamic tension between the inventory as text and the documents that it references; the influence of broader cultural norms concerning other types of inventories, serial records, and collections; the conceptual and practical relationships between family archival inventories and those the crown and the Church; all of these issues and more are addressed in this pioneering volume on family archives and their inventories.”
“Maria de Lurdes Rosa and Randolph C. Head are to be congratulated for drawing together these essays that bring these broad conceptual questions to focus on aristocratic family archives from Portugal, Germany, and France between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. One can only hope that this brief volume will help stimulate further reflection and analysis of archival inventories as an object of historical research.”