The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)

you feel immersed in something vast, oceanic.

No matter how much the real seems to be there, visible and tangible, it reveals nothing more than its physical presence, and it is naive to believe that this is its essence.

What exactly does it mean to make use of these countless sources?

stacked on shelves, measured in kilometers like roads, the archive seems infinite, perhaps even indecipherable. Can you read a highway, even if it is made of paper?

taste for the strange is no better, because it deforms the way we look at the documents. What is left, at the level of the spoken words, is to set about the delicate analysis of the unusual, separating it from both the mundane and the exceptional.

The witness, the neighbor, the thief, the traitor, and the rebel never wanted to leave any written record, much less the one they ended up leaving.

it would give them the opportunity to clean up and impose some order on public spaces.

From the mouths of witnesses or suspects, the archive picks up these indictments that equate women with misfortune, destruction, and even death.

their words reveal things that ordinarily went unspoken.