Sundar Henny: ‘Masters of Useless Information: Private Papers as Treasuries in Seventeenth-Century Zurich’

If you move to England and want to open a bank account you have to produce a proof of address. However, in order to rent a flat you usually have to indicate a British bank account. A similar deadlock ruled in the early modern republic of Zurich: In order to become part of the ruling elite you had to prove the worthiness of your family. This had to be done by pointing to a family history and to respective documentation. However, in order to write a history of one’s family—true or forged—one needed access to state or private archives, both of which were hermetically closed to outsiders. In those days, then, papers meant power. The deadlock could be broken only if an aspiring young man, with the financial backing of his father or a patron, was willing to sacrifice several years in voluntary work, namely working as an amanuensis in the state archive. This would allow him to access state papers—all of them considered to be secret—and to copy extensively for his own developing archive. Such a predicament fostered strangely redundant texts which were cherished just as much for their sheer material existence as for their content. In fact, it is questionable whether much of this written material was read at all—except, maybe, by relatives and intimate friends for the sole reason of copying passages for their own archives. A case in point is the Zurich burgomaster Johann Heinrich Waser (1600–1669) who had to work his way up with the quill. Dozens of hand written, leather bound volumes by him have been handed down, such as several itineraries documenting his Grand Tour to Italy, a ledger on housekeeping, a two-volume autobiography as well as stately volumes with accounts of his work in the service of the church (such as his participation at the Synod of Dordrecht) and of the state (such as heading an embassy to Louis XIV). In many instances, Waser presents himself as a writer, pointing out all the stuff that went “through his hand and quill”. He elaborates in some detail how he had systematised and catalogued the state archive and how, as a bailiff of a castle, he had built himself an archive. He repeatedly refers to other passages in other books written by himself. Last but not least, he created a volume containing only a catalogue of the books handwritten by himself. Interestingly enough, though, many of these books— some of them very prestigious—were left unfinished at crucial places. CfP: Treasuries of knowledge: Collecting and transmitting information in the early modern period Given the nature of written materials (or unwritten ones, for that matter) as secret and treasured, such writings ‘worked’ even if they hardly revealed anything. It is in this context that a patron of Waser, the clergyman Breitinger, concerned about state interference in ecclesiastical matters, founded a church archive. He urged his fellow clergy to preserve church related documents, especially manuscripts of the late reformers Zwingli and Bullinger, “as holy relics ... even if they should be undecipherable”. This “sacrosanct deposit” would safeguard the church, Breitinger thought, from being bullied by the city council, the authority of which had increased enormously after the Reformation.