Abstract

ZERMENO PADILLA, Guillermo. Traveling on the search of the encounter between archive and historiography. Hist. graf [online]. 2012, n.38, pp.13-57. ISSN 1405-0927.

Two questions arise from this research: When and how history, understood as the investigation of the past, and the archive, understood as a witness of times past or as a privileged site of memory, intertwined themselves? How the interest in history, and the necessity of the archive as a support of antiquarian history is born, and what reflections arise? To answer these questions special attention is placed on the period 1750-1820, particularly by following the evolution of the term "archive" and its relation with the writing of history. This is possible through the hypothesis that the uses of the archive and its own modalities of the ancien régime were transformed during those years, making possible the development of a new historiographical practice. Because it is not obvious that the archive is created and evolves before the historians, it does it before the legal/institutional and governmental order. The archive is an instrument of government. The fusion between history and archive can only be glimpsed when a liberal governmental order makes obsolete the previous legal/institutional order, and the laws belonging to the iusnaturalismus start being postulated as historical events.

Keywords : Archive; historiography; memory document/monument; travel; conceptual history; curiositas; antiquarian; historian.

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