Ghent, Thursday 9 December 1451. A procession of aldermen, the two head deans and guild officials under their flags approach the city’s belfry (Arnade 1996, p. 110–111; Van Uytven 1998; Stabel 2000, p. 53). As in other Flemish and French cities, the belfry is regarded as a symbol of civic independence. It is independence that the Ghent guilds are fighting for in their rebellion against the duke of Burgundy. Upon reaching the belfry, some men enter the building to search for the city archives, from which they retrieve a number of letters from counts, dukes, and cities, the earliest written in 1272, the last one in 1440. The letters are translated from French and Latin into Dutch and taken to the nearby Friday market—since the late thirteenth century the place where all important public and political meetings are staged (Boone 2007)—to be read aloud by the leaders of the rebellion. By reading historic promises of protection and cooperation, and pardons granted by Philip the Good after Ghent’s political unrest in the 30s and 40s, they sought to provide the audience with “both a past of legendary rights and a blueprint for action” (Arnade 1996, p. 111). In listening to this ceremonial reading of the city’s records, the Ghent burghers showed themselves to be a textual community. Brian Stock introduced this term for eleventh century dissenters, united by an individual who interpreted and used a written text for reforming a group’s thought and action (Stock 1983). It is perhaps bold to suggest an analogy between on the one hand the Cistercians and Saint Bernard and on the other hand the fifteenth century Ghent burghers and their captains. However, I am not the first to apply the term textual community to a medieval city: in 1994, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak—a professor of history, trained as an archivist at the École des Chartes—used the concept in her ground breaking article “Civic Liturgy and Urban Records in Northern France, 1100–1400” (Bedos-Rezak 1994). In Ghent, as in Stock’s textual communities, the records were re-performed orally, which formed the basis for shared assumptions and a shared identity. The procession on 9 December 1451 to retrieve the documents from the archives and their public reading was a ceremony, in which the textual objects were both enshrined and a shrine for the performance of an urban liturgy (Bedos-Rezak 1994, p. 40).

The records were retrieved from the archive to become part of the citizens’ active or functional memory. Aleida Assmann, distinguishing two modes of remembering—functional memory and storage (or archival) memory, argues that the latter does not constitute collective identity in the way functional memory does:

The archival memory is accessible only to specialists. This part of materially retrievable and professionally interpretable information does not circulate as common knowledge. It has not passed the filters of social selection nor is it transformed into a living memory supported by public awareness and validation by cultural institutions and the public media (Assmann 2006, p. 221, 2010, pp. 43–44).

Assmann acknowledges that the borderline between the archival and the active memory is permeable in both directions: “Some things may recede into the background and fade out of common interest and awareness while; others may be recovered from the periphery and move into the centre of social interest and esteem” (Assmann 2006, p. 221, 2010, pp. 44). But she still equates archival memory with forgetting and considers it static, and not as a constituent of collective identity. I question both arguments, starting with the latter. I have argued elsewhere that any group recognizes itself through its memory of a common past: a community is a “community of memory” (Ketelaar 2005; McKemmish et al. 2005). Constructing a community (any community is a construction) involves an embeddedness in its past and, consequently, in the memory texts through which that past is mediated. As in the textual communities of the eleventh century, these memory texts do not need to be spelled out or reiterated: the members all know what they are (Stock 1983, p. 91). The Ghent burghers knew which important letters were stored in the city archives: they were part of the community’s collective functional memory, which was reinforced by their public reading.Footnote 1

Communities, Jeannette Bastian argues, are defined through the relationship between actions and records, the actions creating a mirror in which records and actions reflect one another (Bastian 2003). A community is therefore also a “community of records”, a term used by Bastian for “the aggregate of records in all forms generated by multiple layers of actions and interactions between and among the people and institutions within a community” (Bastian 2003, p. 5).

This implies also challenging Assmann’s assumption that archival memory is static and can be made dynamic only through permeating the borderline with functional memory. Assmann is, of course, using the archive as a metaphor for (a part of) memory. Many writers, past and present, in applying this metaphor (Draaisma 2000), suggest that the archive is a fixed entity. Only a few understand the dynamics of the archive, as it is shaped by those who build its internal structures (Craig 2002, p. 286; Schwartz and Cook 2002). When the Ghent city archives were (re)organized in 1432, the letters of safe-conduct granted by the French kings were put together in the first drawer (marked A) of the charter press, and not in drawer G which contained the peace treaties.Footnote 2 The documents used in the 1451 rebellion were confiscated by Charles V in 1540 and only later returned to Ghent (Decavele and Vannieuwenhuyse 1983). On the back, they are marked as “chartes confisqués”. Some have been slashed, signifying their cancellation. All these traces point to what I call activations of the record (Ketelaar2001; Nesmith 2005, p. 262–263). Every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation of a record, by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of that record. Each activation attributes to the archive’s infinite meaning. All these activations are acts of co-creatorship that participate in determining the record’s meaning. In the modern conceptualization of the “records continuum”, recordkeeping objects “are marked out by their processes of formation and continuing formation” (Upward 2005, p. 206). A record is never finished and never completed, the record “is always in a process of becoming” (McKemmish 1994, p. 200). This is acknowledged in the concept of mouvance or fluidity, a concept gaining acceptance among scholars of medieval manuscript culture and pragmatic literacy. Mouvance refers to the re-organization and re-use of text, to the repositioning of the text in time–space within different communicational spectra (Arlinghaus 2006). The Ghent letters retrieved from the belfry, translated and performed by public reading, are an example of such movement within a records continuum.

This challenges the distinction between records and archives, a distinction that features more predominantly in North America than in Europe. Records, in current archival terminology, are documents “created, received and maintained as evidence by an agency, institution, organization or individual in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business” (Walne 1988). Only some records are chosen to become archives (or, as some people say, permanent records) to be “preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator” (Pearce-Moses 2005). It is quite obvious, wrote the founding father of American archival methodology, Theodore Schellenberg, “that modern archives are kept for the use of others than those that created them, and that conscious decisions must be made as to their value for such use” (Schellenberg 1956, p. 14). This distinction between creator and user, between records and archives, is questionable. Sir Hilary Jenkinson—that paragon of English archival methodology—warned 50 years ago against “flirting … with Dr. Schellenberg and his arbitrary distinction between Records and Archives.” (Jenkinson 1980, p. 352). The distinction between records and archives is neither valid for modern archives nor founded historically, as I will demonstrate in this article. Records created and maintained by cities in early modern history were archives, the city archives were records: Records out and archives in.

Italian cities experienced, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a scriptural explosion, or revolution (Maire-Vigueur 1995; Cammarosano 1991; Behrmann 1995; Britnell 1997). Beginning in the twelfth century, notaries and civic institutions took over writing and archiving for and on behalf of civic communities, in place of clerics and religious institutions. New documentary genres arose, such as the liber iurium, the city cartulary, and the statute-book, each meant to archive the city’s privileges and other charters. The second phase of the scriptural revolution—coinciding with the replacement of the Podestà by the Popolo around the middle of the thirteenth century—is marked by the introduction of the liber civitatis and subsequently other communal registers.

Henceforth every act of communal administration, the least of its decisions, the smallest of its expenses or the most banal of the judicial procedures, will be the object of a registration in one or the other of the registers kept for these purposes by the notaries attached to each office and each bureau of the commune (Maire-Vigueur 1995, p. 184, translation EK).

A similar documentary revolution occurred in towns elsewhere. In German cities, the liber civitatis appears in the thirteenth century. The Stadtbuch or city book of Cologne starts in 1212, Magdeburg 1215, Lübeck 1227, Rostock and Wismar ca. 1250, Hamburg 1248 (Petter 2006; Pitz 1959; Groten 1997; North 1997). Out of (or parallel to) the general city book, specialized series developed from the thirteenth century. In England, eleven towns are distinguished by the systematic keeping of records from before 1272 (Martin 1997, 2000). The earliest surviving civic records are the registers of guilds, later followed by court rolls of various kinds. Registration of deeds of title starts in Wallingford in 1231, the London Husting roll begins in 1252 (Martin 1971). In Ireland, one finds rolls of admissions to the guild merchant of Dublin from c. 1190 to 1265 and the rolls of admission of free citizens from the early thirteenth century (Connolly 2002). The Liber primus Kilkenniensis, begun in the fourteenth century, has a similar function as the liber civitatis. It contains a variety of material, including charters, records of the election of town officials, admissions of burgesses, by-laws, court proceedings, and rentals of town property.

Setting up a liber civitatis, and even more the establishment of what we currently call a recordkeeping system Footnote 3 of specialized registers (Amtsbuchregistratur), marks the start of a city archive, according to the German medievalist Andreas Petter. He considers the mere keeping of charters not as proper archiving, because it lacks the intent to represent the administration’s affairs, which he deems as the constitutive feature of archives (Petter 2006, p. 29). I agree that we have to distinguish different phases: (1) from safekeeping the incoming charters as evidence of legal rights and obligations, via (2) “cartularization”, that is transcribing and re-ordering those charters, to (3) regularly registering the transaction of business.Footnote 4 The second and third phases resemble what Maire-Vigueur called “l’éveil d’une veritable conscience archivistique” (the rise of a truly archival consciousness), followed by the fourth phase, the scriptural revolution marked by the introduction of civic registers of transactions (in Germany called Amtsbücher). Very often, this coincided with the separation of the original charters from the business records. The former were to be preserved in special repositories, sometimes in a church,Footnote 5 the latter were kept at hand in the registry (Pitz 1959, pp. 467–470).

As Ernst Pitz concluded 50 years ago in his study of the recordkeeping in Cologne, Nuremberg and Lübeck, the introduction of the book as an archiving technique in the cities led to the duality of Urkunden and Akten (Pitz 1959, p. 468). This duality has had a significant effect, since pre-modern and modern scholarship in diplomatics and medieval history focused on the charters, while neglecting the other records. Even archivists in nineteenth and twentieth century Germany and elsewhere privileged charters over other records through their archival management (Meisner 1953, 1969, p. 36). In this respect, the German undifferentiated Stadtbuch and the Italian libri iurium and statute codices fared better than the mass of seemingly monotonous serial records, since the former were put on the same level as the cartulary, treated as reproducing charters which diplomatists could deal with as with the original charters.

There was, of course, an important distinction between the archival memory practices in northern Italy and those north of the Alps. From Roman times, people in the south went to a notary to record their legal affairs, whereas in Germany, northern France, and the Low Countries, people would address the aldermen or another civic institution (Behrmann 1998). The difference, however, should not be overestimated, given the role of notaries as semi-official scriveners in Italian cities. For example, in Bologna the Libri Memoriali were kept by notaries serving the city. The registers include private business transactions, with over a million entries from the years 1265–1399 (Carniello 2002; Behrmann 1998, p. 12).Footnote 6

The city registers served different purposes, as the fifteenth century city clerk of Prague (Prager Neustadt) Prokop wrote in his manual: ad bonum honestum, ad bonum utilem and, thirdly, ad iustum (Petter 2006, p. 41–42). To the first category—for the truly good, or as one might say: serving accountability—Prokop brought the liber memorialis and the book of accounts. The second category—for expediency or what we might call for the service of the community—consisted of the registers of real estate, of servants, of citizens, and of leases. Finally, the judicial registers served what is right. The three categories overlap: the registers in all three categories benefit the city and its citizens. These registers were both records and archives, inscription of the functional and archival memories of the city and the citizens.

It seems logical that citizens had access to these registers, kept by city officials on behalf of the civitas or communitas.Footnote 7 Every citizen could request a search of the registers or the production of an extract, as regulated for example in Florence (1289) (Lodolini 1994, p. 39) and Padua (Bonfiglio-Dosio 2005), while in Siena (1298), the city government provided that all citizens could use all documents and city registers for their own defense or to prove a right.Footnote 8 In Venice and elsewhere, city registers were duplicated or even triplicated, one copy serving public access but secured with a chain: “una delle qual stii de continuo alla bolla ducale, attaccata lì cum una cadenella ferma, in facultà de tutti che la vorano veder, et un’altra simile precise in la cancellaria nostra, publica ad ognuno, et una terza sia conservata nel conseio nostro…” (Salmini 1998, p. 101). Only later, when Italian city governments came into the hands of lords, princes and kings, did secrecy became the norm (Lodolini 1994, p. 50; Koch 1995, p. 67). The White Book (Liber Albus) of the city of London, compiled in 1419, allowed access for anyone to any record, provided the Chamberlain or the Common Clerk found the demand reasonable. Otherwise, any clerk who “monstre la privete des rolles et recordes … soit il puny par soun corps en prisone et perde soun office pur toutz jours” (discloses the secrets of the rolls and records … shall be punished bodily by imprisonment and shall lose his office for ever) (Riley 1859, p. 48; Barron 2004, p. 181).

Petra Koch concludes that in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Italian communes, by appointing special officials for managing records and archives, created legal certainty for themselves and for every individual citizen. Everyone could use the city registers to prove his claim and pursue his right against the commune and his fellow citizens (Koch 1995, p. 49). The city archives were truly “Pro evidenti utilitate omnium et singulorum hominum et personarum et universitatum civitatis Mutine et districtus”, to quote the justification for establishing the camera actorum in Modena in 1316 (Koch 1995, p. 67).Footnote 9 Similarly, the Bolognese statutes of 1357 declared the camera actorum comunis et populi Bononie to contain the records serving as “ipsius comunis et singularum personarum preciosissimum munus et ipsius civitatis et iurium ipsius claritas et tutela et singularium personarum defensio et inventio veritatis” (Lodolini 1994, p. 39). The public archives of the Italian communes, according to Koch, were not in the first instance a place of custody, but became an important place for use in a society that more and more was acting on the basis of writing (Koch 1995, p. 68). The archive became an instrument for governance (Behrmann 1995, p. 16).

Medieval urban records in Northern France, according to Brigitte Bedos, “apart from their more obvious functions, elicited attachment, involvement, and commitment on the part of townspeople” (Bedos-Rezak 1994, p. 34). The English medievalist, Andrew Butcher—who studied the functions of script in the speech community of the late medieval town of Hythe (one of the Cinque Ports)—also argues that the records were communal texts with a social function (Butcher 2004).Footnote 10 Both Bedos and Butcher stress the duality and complementarity of the written and oral modes in medieval towns. Some records—as shown in the episode of the Ghent rebellion this article started with—gained meaning by reading aloud, not so much because of illiteracy, but because the record had, as it were, to be “performed” (Ketelaar 2009). Records do not speak for themselves: to make them alive requires a rhetorical act, as Wolfgang Ernst writes (Ernst 2007, p. 197). Even today, every bill in the Netherlands begins with “Greetings to all who shall see or hear these presents! Be it known…”. Other records were evidence of an orally and publicly performed act, the written deed being evidence of the oral deed (Pitz 1959, p. 462). The record was part of a ceremony or was the centerpiece of a civic ritual, thereby operating as a symbolic form which confirmed the citizens as members of a textual community (Bedos-Rezak, p. 44; Dartmann 2004). This social function of the record is neglected by many writers—even the term “pragmatic literacy” does not fully acknowledge that the creation, storage, and use of records were social and cultural practices, embedded in and constituting communities of memory in early modern cities—and the same is true in today’s Web 2.0 world.