Introduction: Consider the Archive

In recent years, historians of archives have paid increasingly careful attention to the development of state, colonial, religious, and corporate archives in the early modern period, arguing that power (of various kinds) was mediated and extended through material writing practices in and around archives. The history of early modern science, likewise, has tracked the production of scientific knowledge through the inscription and circulation of written records within and between laboratories, libraries, homes, and public spaces, such as coffeehouses and bookshops. This Focus section interrogates these two bodies of scholarship against each other. The contributors ask how archival digitization is transforming historical practice; how awareness of archival histories can help us to reconceptualize our work as historians of science; how an archive's layered purposes, built up over centuries of record keeping, can shape the historical narratives we write; and how scientific knowledge emerging from archives gained authority and authenticity.