Writing Acts

Writing was part of the fabric of the early modern European world, and remains an indispensable source for its historians. But what gave writings their power in the past, and how should this shape our engagement with them in the present? Going beyond the familiar themes and narratives of the printed public sphere or the rise of the information state, Writing Acts examines the direct impact of manuscript documents on the lives and struggles of the Ancien Régime. The study of writing acts, Giora Sternberg argues, illuminates fundamental aspects of early modern agency that cut across typical divides of historical inquiry, relating macro and micro, elites and commoners, centre and periphery. Writing Acts develops a framework for reconstituting early modern sources as the forms of action they once were. It considers documents in their fullness, as material objects as well as verbal texts, and follows their life-course from drafting on writers' desks, through filing in early modern knowledge-bases, to activation on council tables. Writing acts involved a far broader range of producers and protagonists than those familiar from more literary genres. They enabled parties across the social spectrum to subvert all forms of power dynamics: between rulers and subjects, superiors and inferiors, parents and children. Rethinking the relations among writing, action, and power, Writing Acts casts the Ancien Régime in a new light and offers a guide for anyone trying to make sense of its documents.

Giora Sternberg is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford and Ellis-Barnard Fellow and Tutor at Hertford College, Oxford. Previously, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the author of Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV (Oxford University Press, 2014) and of articles in Past and Present, The Journal of Modern History, The English Historical Review, and The American Historical Review.