Seminal aspects of modern state formation occurred through official and unofficial government agents’ correspondence and record-keeping: including material dimensions of the paper documents themselves, their delivery methods, and their means of preservation for posterity. These recent studies by professors Roberts, Gehring, and Popper elucidate in different ways how taking seriously such archival details yields valuable new perspectives for modern historiography. Roberts’ Huguenot Networks brings to light a case study of international relations in the years 1568–1571, foregrounding Anglo-French channels of communication and an official French interrogation in 1570, with Spanish and Dutch associations looming large as broader context. Gehring’s biography of the international traveller and English privy-council secretary Robert Beale emphasizes Beale’s influential agency in amassing a personal archive of political and legal documents. Popper’s Specter of the Archive addresses the British ‘information state’ more broadly, as the book’s full title indicates, and emphasizes the seventeenth century, especially institutional record-keeping at the Tower of London. Popper frames this emphasis by comparing and contrasting the State Papers Office, hence recognizing the parallel long-term significance for individual English administrators’ personal collections of political manuscripts from the late sixteenth century.

The microhistory featured in Roberts’ Huguenot Networks begins with cheese in a basket. On the central coast of northern France, the cloth merchant Jean Tivinat was imprisoned and interrogated in May 1570 for possessing packets of secret correspondence that were intended for delivery to London but got discovered underneath the straw upon which Tivinat transported various cheeses in a travel basket. Roberts’ research for the book built outward from the manuscript document that recounts Tivinat’s interrogation, together with related letters. Transcriptions of those documents appear in an Appendix. Much of the broader story revolves around the Huguenot minister who supplied Tivinat with that clandestine correspondence, Hugues de Regnard, who went by the codename Changy and was known alternately as Saint-Martin or just S.M. This historical character Changy, who wrote most of the letters confiscated from Tivinat, was a gentleman and a cleric who served the early Huguenot cause in France, including its international connections. London residents to whom he wrote in 1570 included Odet de Coligny, the exiled cardinal of Châtillon and count-bishop of Beauvais who helped lead the Huguenot cause with his two younger brothers, the military commanders Gaspard de Coligny (killed infamously in the initial Parisian massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in August 1572) and François de Coligny (at this point in 1570 dead already since 1569). Odet (Châtillon) would die of illness in March 1571, less than a year after this incident. The case study reconstructs broader contexts for the incident itself and for Changy. These involve official diplomats—such as Henry Norris, England’s resident ambassador in Paris, and Bertrand de Salignac, seigneur de La Mothe-Fénelon, France’s resident ambassador in London—as well as figures much higher in the social spectrum, including Protestant princes in the Netherlands and France such as Louis of Condé, Henri of Navarre, and William of Orange. By mapping in detail the archival traces and interpersonal networks of obscure individuals like Changy, this book distinguishes more broadly the activities and motives of Huguenot agents like Changy from those of professional spies. The former incurred considerable life risk more clearly for the sake of their own religious conviction that certain iterations of Christian truth must be both protected and promoted within and across sovereign realms by covert and devious means as necessary. Roberts’ study advances historiography on early modern Europe by foregrounding usefully the material and social contingencies of ideological causes as they were supported by individuals across social spectra at specific moments within pivotal periods such as 1568–1571.

That critical emphasis complements well the exceptionally detailed research and its conclusions about Robert Beale in Gehring’s European Elizabethan. Beale’s life certainly merits this book-length biography, and the material records pose considerable challenges: for their gaps in some areas, such as his early life and extensive European travels in the 1550s and 1560s, as well as for the high volume of manuscripts he collected as his administrative career in England progressed from the early 1570s through the 1590s. Gehring’s research has met those archival challenges deftly with a modest aplomb. Beale was a Marian exile in the mid-to-late 1550s while still a teenager. He, though, unlike his step-uncle and father-figure John Hales, did not return to England promptly nor stay there following Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne. On the question of Beale’s unofficial early learning in civil law, Gehring makes a necessarily circumstantial but compelling case for influence by the prominent French scholar François Bauduin. Beale’s first introduction to Bauduin, with whom he later corresponded directly in 1569 and 1570, might have occurred first at Strasbourg when Bauduin taught there in 1555–1556 while Beale lived there, or rather while Bauduin taught at Heidelberg in 1558–1559. In early 1560, Beale enrolled officially at the University of Wittenberg, where he forged further Franco-German connections, especially through the Burgundian politician Hubert Languet. It was Languet who introduced Beale to Francis Walsingham in Paris a decade later. Meanwhile, in the early-to-mid 1560s, Beale built upon the works of both Bauduin and Hales plus European civil law of previous centuries to produce two manuscript treatises in Latin on the English succession, defending the legitimacy of the highly controversial Grey-Hertford marriage. Those treatises, combined with extensive unofficial commentary on German affairs sent back to England, brought Beale’s expertise on matters of law and foreign policy to the attention of England’s most powerful privy councillors, William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) and Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester), well before Beale met and served Walsingham at Paris: hence Beale’s recall to England for service as a privy-council secretary in 1572 before Walsingham returned to England and became Elizabeth I’s principal secretary of state in 1573. Burghley, Leicester, and Walsingham served as Beale’s chief patrons within the Elizabethan regime across the 1570s and 1580s, despite Beale’s bold advocacy for religious reform in parliament and privately in opposition to Archbishop Whitgift. All the while, Beale supported in person and on paper those regime patrons’ foreign-policy investments in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scotland. Gehring’s biography charts extensively how Beale gained position and protection through his own agency in a career-long strategy of building for himself a legal and political archive of manuscript documents and printed books that he shared with the inner Elizabethan regime’s most powerful men. Beale maintained that personal strategy of archival collection often with a self-consciousness of historical preservation, sometimes laced with a preemptive concern for personal legal defence in the future, as with his large cache of materials pertaining to the prosecution and execution of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in 1586–1587. His personal archive served the Elizabethan regime in a formative manner during his lifetime. It also has proven seminal for modern historiography on Mary Stuart and on English religious controversies of the 1580s and 1590s, through its preservation in the Yelverton collection bestowed upon the British Library in the early twentieth century and catalogued extensively by the early 1990s.

Popper’s Specter of the Archive also focuses on English practices of organizing and producing manuscript documents within governmental institutions. The general argument foregrounds specific individuals’ methods of record-keeping and document production at the Tower of London. Its physical space began being reorganized and galvanized for serving political clients in the late sixteenth century under keeper William Bowyer. Material innovations during his tenure as keeper of the records included a “Repertorium” cataloguing royal charters from the reigns of John through Edward IV, as well as the transferal of texts from original rolls to copies in codex form. Bowyer also deployed Tower materials to create politically inflected manuscript works for prominent patrons in the late 1560s, such as an elaborate genealogy of predecessors to Leicester’s titles and estates and, for Burghley, a policy treatise on royal supremacy in the English church. Bowyer’s successors at the Tower continued his legacy of reorganizing the archive, cataloguing its contents, and making them available to political patrons. In 1585, for example, under Thomas and Michael Heneage, Anglo-Burgundian treaties from the fifteenth century were utilized to help justify the Elizabethan regime’s military intervention in the Netherlands on behalf of rebel provinces. Clear and convenient access to Tower records generated higher demand. That factor was felt more heavily by Bowyer’s son Robert, who was appointed joint-keeper in 1604 and then also Clerk of Parliaments in 1609. Popper’s book focuses primarily on seventeenth-century developments in manuscript record-keeping. From the start, its emphasis on the Tower comes into relief through a comparison and contrast with the early State Papers Office, which was established by the Elizabethan regime in 1578 but lost many contents through the dispersal of papers into state secretaries’ private collections. Custodians of the State Papers Office in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by contrast with those of the Tower, did not catalogue and curate documents from the sixteenth century and earlier for convenient reference. Popper’s broad argument concerns how material practices of preserving and disseminating knowledge both shaped and circumscribed England’s political consciousness along its road to empire. Even in the late sixteenth century, Popper claims, William Bowyer’s reference tools at the Tower “wavered between guides to the records and replacements for them” (29), and, more broadly, “the work of politics became that of collating, comparing, and contrasting texts” (52).

Methodology in Popper’s Specter of the Archive complements those of Roberts in Huguenot Networks and Gehring in European Elizabethan by emphasizing localized contingencies of material circumstance and unsung individuals’ purposeful agency in early modern paper politics. For wide-lens historiography, Gehring and Popper shed new light on the decentralized nature of early modern English state papers, a reality that stands in sharp contrast with the imperial bureaucracy of early modern Spain, both for politicians then and for historians now. Roberts, while emphasizing Anglo-French microhistory with similarly detailed manuscript research, calls attention more explicitly to the importance of modern editorial and archival legacies with early modern English state papers. Nineteenth-century edited collections and the digital scans of manuscripts in the State Papers Online database allow scholars to access disparate manuscript texts for early modern England in relatively centralized and searchable forms. The latter resource facilitates analysing details of physical inscription. All three books emphasize rightly the importance of attending closely to such material details for reconstructing the dynamics of early modern political and religious cultures.