Project headed by Michelle Hamilton, Marguerite Ragnow and Juliette Cherbuliez

The Project

An archive is a site of cultural memory. It is defined by both what its contains and what it leaves out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. As Ann Stoler has explored, an archive is an epistemic space that, while promising proof texts and “truths” of the past, sometimes only offers vestiges of the violence that left the record to the victors, while the trace of the vanquished is lost. 

How do we restore the traces of the vanquished, instrumentalised, and unheard?  We aim to explore questions about what an archive is, what it has been and what it can be, as well as how has it been constructed and how we might prefer it be deconstructed or re-constructed. Guiding questions include: What kinds of knowledge have traditionally been included in premodern archives and how were and are such archives constructed, and, importantly for us as scholars today, who constructed and continues to construct as well as who worked with and in, and continues to work with and in such archives? What was not included or what has gone missing from such archives? How might we approach archives in novel ways to allow otherwise unheard voices to be located and considered?   

We have three goals: 

• to restore the epistemological complexity of the premodern world to our research habits by combining our modern disciplinary knowledge as we examine our objects of study; 

• to create productive dialogue and exchange information about archival study across a range of practices, by bringing together librarians, curators, archivists, scholars, and the curious public

• to develop a set of best practices in new, predisciplinary approaches to the lost voices of the archive. 

Our practice:  We work in multidisciplinary teams to bring new light and methods to archival collections, objects, and concepts.  We do so by hands-on investigation of archival objects, theoretical readings, and experiments in defamiliarizing scholarly inquiry. 

The example we focused on, which shares a similar formulaic structure with the others, records the voice of a man renouncing these freedoms:

"So that neither I nor my children can or can choose from now on[,]  any other domination or lordship that is not you and those you want, nor claim for any other reason... For greater security in the possession of my body and that of my children and that of my things; I promise and agree with you and with anyone you want to always give each other in peace, annually, as a census, for the feast of All Saints, a couple of chickens."  (translation from the Latin).

This and the other self-enslavement documents brought up many questions for us: 

• Why would someone enslave themselves and their children in perpetuity?  These are not slaves being bought; these are free people.  Religious minorities like Muslims or Jews might have sought protection, as might have peasants vulnerable to war and/or famine, from the wealthy land-owning family in the area.   We could look at the weather records for this region.

• Why would these records be kept? Are they from a family archive?  Is this the same as XIth-century French monasteries, which kept all documentation of properties in case of legal challenges?

We discussed how these short statements give us just a glimpse of this process--the highly formulaic voice of the person entering into slavehood. In addition, though, to these voices, we have witnesses and notaries. Sometimes priests are notaries.  They could have had slaves in their communities.  In at least one instance, we read in a different hand, the signature of a woman who had similarly sworn herself into slavery. 

What does it tell us about the Archive?

Dr. Ragnow provided information about how these documents were acquired in batches from a book dealer.  The question of acquisition is an important one.  It takes an enormous amount of work and mediation to get these sources into the hands of researchers, which is one of the goals of Dr. Ragnow and the James Ford Bell Library.  The question of what is available to study in an archive is a significant one:  if documents aren't collected and made available in public research archives like the James Ford Bell Library  (for example if they stay in private collections), then we cannot know about them.   So how do you acquire a document that isn't represented in the archive?  These documents come from a known Portuguese dealer.  Concerns about acquiring these documents included vociferous arguments against trafficking in documents about trafficking.  Publicity around their acquisition can be stymied by worries of triggering readers.  

This is a significant issue that the Bell Library has faced with, for example, the archives of families who owned indigo plantations in the Caribbean, such as the  Mauger family archives, or the Bousquet family papers.  

• What are the best ways to encourage researchers to examine them without celebrating their content?  

• How to both respect the connections to current trauma and help change our version of the past to include more voices?  

Librarians and archivists endeavor to make documents available.  We need researchers to understand these documents better.  

These documents are fairly isolated in the collection: there are other documents about slavery, but not from this period, so people don't necessarily think about looking to the Bell for this kind of document. 

How should we be thinking about slavery on the Iberian peninsula?

Ongoing conversation with Michelle Hamilton, Jean Dangler, Stacy Bezdeka, Marguerite Ragnow, and Juliette Cherbuliez

The Cambridge History article suggests that there are so many different manifestations of slavery (servus) in the Middle Ages that it's hard to generalize or define.  As a legal category, it's not necessarily about one's labor, or describing a physically demeaning situation.  It definitely reflects a socially low status.  But can we say that it's about a curtailment or foreclosure of "freedom?"  Hispanists want to know what is the relationship between these documents and the Siete Partidas? 

Documents use many different words instead of servus, leading scholars to say that there are other categories that are not slavery.  But might we say the opposite, and argue that slavery is not limited to servus, but encompasses a wider range of named states of unfreedom.  Serfdom, your labor entails you, including for multiple people.   

What obligations did the slavers have?  These documents are so rare that we've made assumptions about what those obligations are, but they are not spelled out in these documents.  Besides the phrase that they are "doing for security," there are no indications of what they get.  

What limitations does the concept of "unfreedom" pose?   It occludes questions of dependency.   For example, in transactions involving land, there is often language signaling dependency -- the person from whom you obtain land might be due a  census, military census.  

In fact, these documents don't spell out any obligations at all, either on the part of the enslaved or the enslaver:  the enslaved gets security, but what do they have to do?   

Deborah Blumenthal's essay on slavery in the Cambridge Companion to Slavery in Iberia focuses on urban centers on coasts -- but these documents are from a remote area in the Mountains.  We need to think about slavery as a local practice, and across eras, generations, and time periods.  

What can we do with such epistemologically fragile documents?  We can situate them, however precariously, in whatever we know -- the important piece is to continue to situate them, in order that they continue to be explored.

Questions, pistes à suivre:
--How big is the domain of this family during the 12th-13th centuries?
--What climate problems were happening in this period (might famine have been an object)?
--Might we make a time-space map of these documents (they cover three generations of the enslaving family)?
--How might we tell if the enslaved are Jews or Muslims?
--Several of these are from before 1276. The King of Aragón, Jaume I (d. 1276), commissioned an important Chronicle that has been translated into English. It might be good to examine for information on the family and area.

Team Meeting: Trouble in the Archive: Wangensteen Historical Library

Tuesday, March 4 2025

We talked about a series of troubling, contentious documents, including an early 20th-century court case about cannibalistic ideation and 18th- and 19th-century books of advice about keeping prisoners. We talked with curators Lois Hendrickson and Emily Beck about how we can responsibly engage with archives that are important yet ethically challenging as sources. 

• The recommended contextual reading is Wright, D., & Saucier, R. (2012). Madness in the Archives: Anonymity, Ethics, and Mental Health History Research. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 23(2), 65–90. https://doi.org/10.7202/1015789ar. 

• Lois and Emily have interest in congregate care: prisons, orphanages and insane asylum. 

• We discussed issues around documents that are deeply unsettling in a variety of ways and how to best deal with them. Emily thinks this is particularly true in the premodern period. She has been thinking about it around trans people recently. There is lots of evidence in the premodern record. How should we deal with this without tokenizing or revealing too much information? 

• Lois mentioned scholars who work with enslaved populations. Previously schoalrs have hidden the identities of the enslaved people they study, but now people are wondering if we should reveal more. This has come up in dealing with madness and individuals deemed mad who were denied a voice in society.

• These texts in the archive are yucky, but very useful for understanding the past and people who lived there. We looked at 3 documents that were bought last year. The curators debated about whether to buy these. They are creepy for a variety of reasons: they include actors who were Nazis; one involves cannibalism; another involves prisoners. 

1. Madness

The first document was the medical file composed by the expert  Dr. De Crinis describing the cannibalistic ideation of the patient (Von E). The family of the latter wants to have Von E deemed insane, claiming he was a cannibal, so that they can have his estate. They call in an expert who is a Nazi who was involved in medical experiments, Dr. De Crinis, to evaluate the person. De Crinis was a head of a group of psychologists recruited in 1939 to work on "euthenasia." Von E's family is wealthy and has 10 castles. He is assessed in the 1941 incapable of handling family finances. The file also contains letters from Von E to the doctors at the charity hospital. One of the doctors is a woman, Dr. Opitz. These letters ended up in her estate. It is from Berlin. 

• Max De Crinis was responsible for the Action T-4 program which was the "euthanasia" program for people with disabilities. He killed himself in 1945 by taking a cyanide tablet after killing his whole family with potassium cyanide (according to Wikipedia).

• The patient is Friedrich Graf Von Egloffstine. It has been over 80 years, but the patient is foreign. There would be ethical questions about digitizing this. You might want to have someone with a research interest in Nazi medicine to look at this. It is not used in classes. 

• It includes 3-4 pages of a word association that Von E does: examples "red [in German]"= tulip; "sweet"= sugar; "kind" = friend.

• This document helps us to consider: What do mental health evaluations look like for someone with a lot of money and what does it look like for someone without money? 

• This person was deemed incapable of managing the family money. The case is about taking away this person's rights. This can be found in other situations through time and even today: when do we take rights away from people, like the elderly? This can also relate to the history of emotions. 

• We discussed how to catalogue this information and how to provide enough information for researchers to find these documents but not too much to be triggering. Scholars working in these fields talk about the backdoor that people working in the field know about--how to find this type of material without using terms like "racism" in the metadata.

• There are bioethics in medical school and the Neurenberg Trials play a big role in that, as do the Tuskegee Trials of untreated syphilis.
  
  

2. Convict labor

Item # 2, was a convict ship log, for the Matilda Atheling from 1868. It is a "dosido": a book written one way and then flipped over and a separate text written another way. The first text is a detailed list of rules and duties. The other side/text is one person's journal, a day-to-day account of weather, the conditions of the sea, what is happening on the ship (includign a wreck) and the prisoners (who protest a lot about their diet., their conditions). Many are kept in chains and handcuffs, they get sick with sea sickness, requests to ventilate the ship, people who are put into a blackbox on the deck. Some soldiers brought their families: a woman gives birth on board and the baby is named for the ship, "Matilda." The ship is heading from England to Gibraltar. The prisoners are going to work on defensive structures. 

• This is challenging because it deals with prisoners and the person in charge of their health. 

• There are other documents that include Japanese medical experiments done on prisoners during the war. 

• We had a discussion about patient records and how to find old patients' records. HIPA makes patient records confidential  for 75 years after their death. Other countries have more complex rules. Lots of scholars don't do this research because it is too hard. This also makes it difficult to evaluate past medical studies based on patient data that you cannot access.

• We concluded with a discussion about how to study past congregate care records such as from St Peters, state schools for the blind, the deaf, etc. We wondered about how medical records exist and archived today: how are patients' records archived or made accesible in the digital age? Thinking about helathcare in prisons we wondered: How would you ever get those records? And in prisons for profit? Prisoners are like children and the eldery in that they have less than full rights in our society.
   

3. Prisoners and the Poor

Item # 3 includes a treatise by a prison reformer, Thomas Fowell Buxton. It includes a description of several prisons that he visited and their conditions. It includes one visit to a prison in Pennsylvania, which was a center of prison reform at the time. The rest are British prisons.This is based on his first-person visits and on written sources. He asks: Are crime and misery produced or prevented by prison discipline? He is critical of the reasons people are imprisoned, including 13 and 14 year-old girls accused of stealing from the estates where they work. The author of the second text included in the same bound book is Good and he describes disapprovingly the number of poor people in England. He thinks it is a good idea to gather the poor and have them provided for in work houses. Good was a medical doctor who had two failed medical practices and who suffered from poverty.  

**The Created Archive**

Tessa brought her anatomical notebook. She made it when she worked in the anatomy department. They had to get rid of all their human material specimens because donors did not give permission. 3-D scans of bones--no one can be in the room when it is done. But once the scan exists it is not governed by those constraints. The platform is still restricted by password for students in the medical progam. She is working with a team to create a new anatomical atlas. It will be the only ethically sourced anatomical atlas in the country in existence. She brought a card from the Muetter Museum which is going through a reckoning: did they get permission for their wall of skulls?

• Donors now can give permission for their bones to be photographed. Does that extend to 3-D printing? How do you contribute to the knowledge without contributing to the separation or the disembodiement that has happened in the past with the use of bones and others specimens from subjects who may not have given consent? Now when creating archives of such objects, specimins, images and models, it is important to consider the educational purpose. Will it help students? How do we undertand the ethics of doing cool things with body parts? And when the ethics change, what do we do with these things?

• She also presented the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center which she worked on at Dickenson. These records were used to exhume graves on the property and get the remains to families/tribes. They wanted families to have access to be able to find out what happened to their loved ones. They worked with members of tribes in the Pennsylvania area.