Documents in Archives

[Mark Knowles]

Although I think Mark is referring to documents not yet available online that would be directly related to the VM, whether research related or provenance, I think it will also be invaluable to have more medieval and other manuscripts available online for comparison to the VM. For example, so far I haven't run across any that have folios even remotely like the Rosettes but that doesn't mean such isn't out there to be found or found but not yet digitized. Time will tell.

I can only advise that researching in an archive, even 'just' a library, in order to find a specific and desired item, is the wrong approach.

Don't ever expect to go to an archive and be the first to search any part of it. Or to be among the first 20.

I can only disagree on the basis of my experience, particularly with respect to cipher research. If one finds a reference to a specific document in a text or online that has not been digitised then it makes sense to either contact the archive and request a photoreproduction or visit the archive oneself whichever is most convenient and cost effective. Yes, in an ideal world one would search all archives for anything, but this is not practical. Certainly it makes sense to search a specific archive for relevant documents when one has reason to believe it might have such documents.

I have collected all the specific ciphers from the late 14th and early 15th century whose precise location I know about, except for a 14th century accounting cipher that I have not bothered to track down. Now certainly more documents could be found by searching specific archives, my best guess is there might be cipher materials in the Vatican archives from this time that I am not currently aware of as the materials from there that I have seen are quite limited. In so far as my cipher collection is biased it is really biased towards those ciphers that have been referenced somewhere in books or online or I have heard about from someone else and I don't think that is a problematic bias, though certainly seeing more than those would be great. Searching all the archives in Italy is not practical, so one needs clues.

I note that Koen has listed on his website some manuscripts that have not been digitised that he would like to see with reference to his research into Diebold Lauber etc.; I am not sure if I think they are worth pursuing or not as I haven't yet studied his writing on that. However it makes sense to try to track down certain documents.

Certainly one is very unlikely to be the first to look at any archive; the archivists will have looked through the archive. However one may be the first to look for a specific kind of document. I know that archivists can't always recognise what a cipher, from the time that I am interested in, looks like.