Unlocking the potential of the Archives: a PhD candidate's perspective
A mid-seventeenth-century plan of the Venerable English College, Rome, prior to the rebuilding work of 1685
From October 2019 to March 2020, Emma Wall, a PhD candidate in medieval Italian literature at Durham University, worked in the College Archives on a student work placement supported by the Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership and funded by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. In the blog below, Emma reflects on her experience.
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Forming a unique historical collection, but yet to be catalogued comprehensively, the Archives of the Venerable English College offer massive research potential which is yet to be fully realised.
As part of my PhD programme, I have been fortunate to spend a sustained period of five months in the Archives, contributing to the management and preservation of this precious resource. My focus has been predominantly on the cataloguing of material: this work has formed part of the long on-going process of opening up the collections and unlocking their cultural significance and capacity for supporting research.
Helping with an archival collection at the embryonic stages of its cataloguing confers a unique responsibility upon whosoever is given the task, but it is a responsibility I have found richly rewarding.
On entering the archival storage area, the vast potential and wealth of historical knowledge to be found is immediately clear, as is also a sense of the immense nature of the task at hand in preserving and managing such a collection. From bundles of documents wrapped in paper and bound in string, still untouched on the shelves following their six-year sojourn in the vaults of the Vatican Archives during the Second World War, to rare books and manuscripts on the table desperately awaiting conservation as soon as funding permits, the Archives are a largely untapped resource, and require a great deal of attention.
In the context of this uncharted nature of the Archives, exposure to the material has afforded me with a wide-ranging experience of the archival world and the management of a collection. The current lack of a permanent archivist has meant that I have had a great deal of responsibility during my placement: this has provided me with hands-on experience in dealing with and cataloguing unique and precious documents and manuscripts, as well as contributing towards identifying conservation needs.
Emma Wall at work in the Schwarzenbach Reading Room, 28 February 2020
Gaining knowledge of the practicalities of cataloguing in a hands-on manner has improved my transferable skills of objectivity, attention to detail, and succinctness, all incredibly beneficial in the wider professional world. This is in addition to the development of skills specific to the heritage management sector, and research skills, including palaeography and document handling: I have improved my language and reading skills of Latin, Italian and Spanish through exposure to a wide variety of scripts from periods ranging from the medieval through to the twentieth century.
The learning experience in the Archives cannot be fully comprehended without my including a few words about the materials I have been cataloguing, the process of which has shown me the importance of facilitating access to the valuable resources held here. The all-encompassing nature of the collection cannot be understated.
Although I began my placement by cataloguing some sixteenth-century legal documents in Latin from the Scritture (the unbound manuscripts section of the Archives), my first significant undertaking was to catalogue the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century personal papers of Edward Meredith, SJ (1648–1715). Comprising approximately 750 folios in total, the material includes his executing of the will of Sir William Godolphin (1635–1696); relations with and comments upon the exiled court of James II at Saint-Germain in France; correspondence with Ralph Postgate SJ (1648–1718), rector of the College from 1693 to 1699 and again from 1704 to 1707; financial papers relating to the Venerable English College, some showing the relationship between the College and travellers on the Grand Tour, such as the painter Charles Lucy (1692–after 1758); and, not least, Meredith’s frustrations with everyday life, including his concern that his coffee roaster be transported safely to him from Rome to his base in Naples.
Drawing together all the different, and sometimes disparate, strands of such an immense collection of papers, making links and cross-referencing material has been a task which has honed my problem-solving skills and sharpened my attention to detail. The cataloguing of these papers has also vastly enriched our knowledge of the collection, with the addition of hundreds of names and keywords to the archival database, greatly facilitating access for future researchers.
The importance for research purposes of cataloguing material thoroughly, down to item level, became clear to me when a former student of the College, Monsignor John Allen, came to the Archives for six weeks in the late autumn of 2019 to research and write a new history of the College’s villa house at Palazzola, to mark the centenary of its purchase in 1920.
Until recently, most of the College’s documentation relating to Palazzola had been kept in the College’s administrative offices and had not formed part of the Archives. The systematisation and cataloguing of the material was therefore crucial to ensuring that the documentation could be accessed and properly referenced in the new history of the villa. This necessitated a period of approximately one month cataloguing 44 folders of material, for which I also needed to devise a system of organisation, within the existing framework of the catalogue, to create order from the chaos. This was a significant undertaking, for which efficiency, speed and accuracy were crucial in ensuring the thorough cataloguing of the material within a defined and limited time-frame. Such a rapid learning curve resulted in my becoming more confident in my archival skills and capabilities in managing a cohesive archival project.
As a specialist in literature, this has also been for me an immersive experience into the world of the historian. With little or no historical background knowledge when I began the work placement, I quickly learned a huge amount about early modern religious and political history, as well as gaining very useful historical research skills, should this be an area I wish to pursue in the future.
My most recent project, cataloguing the 1,097 Responsa of students entering the Venerable English College between 1598 and 1685, has immersed me in this type of investigative rather than interpretative research, where the piecing together of information from various historical sources to create a complete picture of events and people proves richly rewarding: as this work involved the entering into the catalogue database of the real names of the students, together with the alias or aliases by which they were known during their time at the College, attention to detail and accuracy was of the first importance.
Cataloguing the various types of documents from the Scritture has given me a comprehensive exposure to a variety of materials, equipping me with the ability to assess and interpret widely differing items from disparate periods and contexts. From texts of Masses, financial records, estate management papers, student plays, customs documents, to legal disputes over rents, buildings costs, and vineyards, my experience in the Archives has afforded me the opportunity to gain skills and knowledge that would not have been possible within the constraints of my own PhD research. My time in the Archives has been of great value, not only from a personal perspective, but also as a starting point for realising the future potential in such a valuable and unique historical resource, which I hope will be one day fully accessible to all.
Emma Wall
PhD candidate, Durham University
March 2020