2025/05/14 by Gary Rivett · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/1468-229x.70016
openalex publication_date 2025/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Nicholas Popper's first investigation into the foundations of early modern political practice appeared in 2012.That work, titled Walter Raleigh's 'History of the World' and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance, revealed how political elites used the study of the past to navigate politics and, in the process, fundamentally altered early modern intellectual and political cultures.The Specter of the Archive continues these themes by unpicking something more fundamental: the nature of early modern archival practices and the modalities of Britain's emerging information state.Developing recent scholarship on the 'archive as subject' including, in an early modern context, that of Randolph Head, as well as Jacob Soll's and Paul Dover's work on the information state, Specter of the Archive provides the first full account of Britain's part in this wider European shift in archival and information management.While only focusing on the central information state and its constituent archives, rather than the wider range of local initiatives that Paul Griffiths has recently described, Popper nonetheless provides a finely grained analytical framework for interrogating early modern archival practices that could be applied more widely.By examining two key government repositories -the Tower of London and the State Paper Office -Popper tightly limits his study, allowing him to trace the different archival practices that emerged and evolved from the Elizabethan to the Restoration period.Each chapter centres on a set of individuals; an approach that helps exhibit the diverse methods employed by succeeding generations to organize and make use of the copious hoard of information stored by the state.Chapter 1 examines the early reorganization of the Tower of London by the Keeper of the Records, William Bowyer, in the 1560s and 1570s.Chapter 2 centres on the early Stuart period and how information flowed into the Tower from a diversity of communication networks, which necessitated innovation, principally conducted by Arthur Agarde, in the management, ordering and access to records.Chapter 3 explores two aspects of early seventeenth-century state administration: the apparent impermanence of some state offices; and the emergence and stabilization of a key archive, the State Paper Office, orchestrated by Thomas Wilson.Chapter 4 discusses how archival materials were plumbed for arguments that supported specific Stuart visions of the state.However, far from securing and fostering unity and promoting uniform and integrated ideas about authority and legitimacy, divisions were exacerbated.As a prelude to the civil wars of the 1640s, Popper suggests that such activities created instabilities, undermining the early Stuart polity.Chapter 5 turns to the tumultuous decades of the mid-seventeenth century.Popper argues that information became a central weapon in warfare but not only as a source of evidence that supplied partisans with different accounts of the past, the state or parliamentary authority.Information was something to be protected and made inaccessible to one's enemies.Meanwhile, discovering ways to access an opponent's archives to discover their secrets was a key strategy.Selecting what information to release to the public was a careful act of manipulating political and public opinion.Included among the well-known and chief instigators of such warfare are William Prynne and John Thurloe.Finally, Chapter 6 enters the Restoration period when, Popper suggests, Joseph Williamson emerged as a key figure in Charles II regime.Williamson created a qualitatively and quantitively different type of information machinery that was designed to create a perpetual flow of information, along