November 2022

Back to the archives

Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou (2022) 'Back to the Archives', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/november -2022

My visit to the Ambrosiana Library in November 2022 has been a very important event in the development of the project. First of all it was my first physical visit to archives after the pandemic and I felt very emotional about that. But it was much more than the first post-pandemic archival visit.

The Ambrosiana Biblioteca is a historic library in Milan founded in 1609 and inludes an art gallery, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. I was apprehensive of my visit there, but the actual experience in the Reading Room, the Sala Lettura was both enjoyable and comfortable. As I have written elsewhere at length an archive visit needs careful preparation and communication in advance, particularly so when the time and the budget of the visit are limited. And prepared I was.

In the preparatory phase of the research project, I had already been in touch with the archivists and I had a detailed inventory of Maria Gaetana Agnesi's manuscripts that I was planning to study.

I had booked my visit there, following the advice of the archivists, but also the general rules of the manuscripts division: up to four pieces per day, although they could make exceptions for foreign visitors like myself. It turned out that I did not need the exceptions as my experience has always been: take your time with the archive. (see Tamboukou 2014)

During the pandemic I had also got access to some digitized documents of the inventory, to have an overall idea of Agnesi's handwriting, but nothing could have prepared me for the affective experience of sitting in the Sala Lettura, looking at and touching Agnesi's notebooks and letters.

Archival sensibility (Moore et al. 2016) is not an idea, it is a material space/time experience, my being in the Sala Lettura forcefully reminded me.

Just because of the cataloguing order of the manuscripts, the first notebook I was given was, O 183 sup.: Opuscolo mitologico d'incerto autore tradotto in greco da Maria Gaetana Agnesi e scritto di sua mano per propria istruzione.

Quite simply it was a pamphlet on mythology written by an uncertain author, translated into Greek by Agnesi and written by her hand for her own instruction. The archival fever took its heights, when the language I was taught at school was in front of my eyes in a young girl's careful and calligraphic handwriting. What could I have desired more? The handwritten trace of language surfaced again in the second manuscript I was given: 0184: I due libri di supplemento a Quinto Curzio colla traduzione in italiano, francese, tedesco e greco di Maria Gaetana Agnesi e scritti di sua mano. There I had the opportunity to follow her learning process in three languages I could read and understand: Latin, French and Greek. Translation has come up as a strong theme and the literature suggests that it was through translation that women would be allowed to participate in the circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe. (see Findlen 1995).

It feels so good to be back to the archives!

References

Findlen, Paula. 1995. 'Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy'. Configurations 3 (2), 167-206.
Moore, Niamh, Salter Andrea, Stanley, Liz and Tamboukou, Maria. 2016. The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge.
Tamboukou, Maria. 2014. ‘Archival research: unravelling space/time/matter entanglements and fragments, Qualitative Research, 14(5), 617-633.