Archive Proximity

[Mark Knowles]

I live in Italy, more precisely in Padua. I travel a lot around the country, so if you have any specific requests involving an archive near a major city, I can probably help 

Thank you very much for both your offers of assistance in expanding our collective knowledge of primo quattrocento cifrari(early 15th century ciphers).

I have quite a lot of experience with the Archivio di Stato(State Archives) in Italy. I have some experience with the Archivio Storico Diocesano(Church Archives) and some experience with Biblioteca (Regional library archives). There are also other archives such as University archives, Comune Archives and Monastic Archives. I have little knowledge or experience of researching in the Vatican Apostolic Archives.

Generally if one knows of a specific document or manuscript in a specific archive or library then one can request to be emailed photoreproductions from that archive or library. They will charge a fee per page for those photoreproductions. This is relatively inexpensive unless there are a very large number of page of photoreproductions that one wants. Nevertheless even in this situation it works out cheaper in most instances than visiting the archive oneself and taking photos. The presence of specific documents can be determined from references in book, archive/library inventories, Google searches etc. For documents such as cipher ledgers there are normally references that one can find elsewhere. However for individual enciphered letters or individual cipher keys this is less likely to be the case. Normally, archivists have little knowledge of what they have in their archive other than what is listed in their inventories as archives tend to be so large that it is unlikely archivists have very detailed knowledge of their contents.

Where work needs to be done I think is in searching for enciphered letters in particular. I have found enciphered letters in archives which were not documented anywhere including in archive inventories. Some archive inventories are very detailed listing every document in a given box or group of boxes. Unfortunately, some other archive inventories are lacking detail merely specifying that there are, for example, Ducal correspondence from 1434 to 1444 in box number 1187. In such a case, one needs to look through every letter in a given box to see if there are any ciphers amongst them.

Archivio di Stato inventories tend to have been scanned and are available for download from their website. Some of these inventories are in digital format and so one can search for words like "cifra" to see if they have any ciphers listed. However, other inventories can be scans of older typed documents which have not been digitised and so potentially, without OCR, one has to manually search through the entire document for references to "cifra". Some inventories may even be handwritten, which makes looking for references to ciphers very laborious.

So, it seems to me when researching in Padua or Turin or anywhere else in Northern Italy one must start by identifying a box or boxes that one thinks would be most likely to contain a cipher or ciphers. Making an arrangement to come and search that box with an archive tends not to be very difficult from my experience.

More information to follow...