Ashes and "the Archive": The London Fire of 1666, Partisanship, and Proof

Mice, mold, fire, flood--and assiduous destruction by the very subjects whom we study--have diminished and rendered somewhat random extant evidence of the medieval and early modern periods. As a result, scholars of these periods need to think creatively about what remains. We still make some "discoveries," of course. For instance, work on early modern England has been transformed by more careful and creative inquiry into understudied materials: church court records, chancery and probate records, popular print, religious discourses, women's writings. As these last three categories particularly reveal, however, none of this evidence has exactly been buried, awaiting discovery like the lost tombs of Egypt. Instead, for the most part, we know what's there; a new question leads to research "discoveries" in the field more often than does a new document. It's not what you "find"--which some industrious antiquarian in the nineteenth century probably led you to anyway--it's what you have to say about it. ¹

And yet, it is hard not to feel that we should be digging up "new" sources, especially given the fact that granting agencies are most likely to recognize the discovery of evidence as the creation of new knowledge, and research libraries are most likely to fund those projects that rely most heavily on their collections. What Robert Darnton called "grubbing in the archives" feeds a desire among humanities scholars, especially those who study literature, to understand our own practice as in some way "hard." ² In the current institutional and political context, in which humanities scholars, especially those who study the remote past, must justify their existence, it sometimes feels as if we've got two choices: we can defend our practice as the appreciation or fuller understanding of recognized authors, or as the creation of new historical knowledge. I sometimes think of the choice in these terms: love the bard, or find a fact. Hence the current retreats to aestheticism, archives, or, in some cases, both. In a research proposal, or a dinner party conversation, or a book treatment, a bid to legitimacy as a scholar creating new knowledge can best be bolstered by claiming to have found something no one else has found--to need a trip to an archive, rather than to plug away dismally and unromantically with microfilm. As a consequence, at the same time that literary critics, for instance, cast their nets more widely in response to the oft-repeated criticism that they make too much of a single text, episode, or artifact, nostalgia lingers for the one spectacular piece of evidence: which no one else has seen or quoted; which will ground the free float of association; which will legitimize our practice. ³ The archive, particularly when understood as a depository of unpublished records and documents, as opposed to more broadly diffused and widely available print "culture," promises what other scholars do not have, the uniquely juicy and justifying tidbit.

This climate helps to explain the otherwise quirky experiment Megan Matchinske conducts in her recent book, Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern England. Matchinske engages in "a literal re-imagining of historical record" by composing a letter that the Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow might have written to her daughter. She offers a narrative of how she herself might have found such a document in a priory in Devon, the precise state of the imagined manuscript, and a transcript of the letter in suitably challenging faux old spelling, as if the more fully she imagines and describes her composition the more proof-value she can confer upon it. In the process, she enacts a perfect identification of researcher and subject, which is also an absolute form of intellectual property; as she says, "Margaret Clitherow's letter is my letter." ⁴ What interests me about Matchinske's choice...