The Private Political Archives of the Venetian Patriciate – Storing, Retrieving and Recordkeeping in the Fifteenth-Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article describes the birth and development of the political archives that Venetian patrician families kept in their private palaces for the use of the Republic's officeholders. It will shed light on the different uses made of public documents as well as on the different approaches to recordkeeping, from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. These archives, shared by all family members and transmitted from generation to generation, eventually became extremely voluminous partly because copies from documents in public registries were made and kept, but also because new types of analytical documents based on data extracted from the public record were introduced. Until the eighteenth century, when rational retrieval systems began to be introduced, the documents were kept in ‘buste’ (containers) and extracted as and when needed by the officeholder.