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The (not so) Secret Vatican Archives: A Practical Guide for Researchers
In the first of our posts on doing research abroad, Fred Smith (@Fred_E_Smith) explores the Secret Vatican Archives. Aliens? Illuminati secrets? Devices that can see into the future? It seems that no conspiracy theory is too far-fetched for those who speculate what may be hidden within the vaults of the Archivum Segretum Vaticanum. [1] Indeed, the…
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What’s in a map?
By Zoe Farrell | @zoeffarrell At first glance, a map is a simple entity. It is a tool through which towns and cities can be organised so that people can gain knowledge of places, roads, waterways and significant buildings. However, maps are often in fact complex objects of state building, propaganda and identity formation. J.…
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Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory
By Clemency Hinton (@clemencyhinton) Does the past sometimes feel ‘far away’? Can we ever ‘go back’? And ‘where’ did we come from? These questions demonstrate that we often conceptualise and speak about history in spatial terms. That is, we describe the past as a place. History has famously been called a ‘foreign country’. Perhaps the…
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The Grand (Archival) Tour
By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell) One of the many advantages of being a historian who studies other countries is the ample opportunities for travel. My work focuses on artisans and material culture in sixteenth-century Verona, and I have therefore spent a lot of time in Veronese archives. However, I am also interested in how Renaissance culture travelled,…
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Constructing an archive: a reflection on British Library collections
By Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) As historians, we are often used to thinking about an archive as a fixed set of documents kept in a static physical location. An appropriate historical source is often considered as such only if it can be verified by ‘real’ material from a ‘real’ archive.[1] Yet, archives mean different things to different researchers.…
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