이탈리아의 기록물과 기록물관리학

Abstract

Today Italy doesn't have most archives created in the ancient times. Except some examples which was known to the world by archeological excavation, the oldest documents remaining in Italy, just like those of most other West European regions, date back to the Middle Ages. Considering well-known historical changes―the progress of large-sized autonomous cities in middle and north Italy and kingdoms of south Italy, the number of archival heritages of many large-sized autonomous cities had sharply increased since the late 12th century―especially since the 13th century. Frequent emergence of polities support the fact that archival heritages of the late Middle Ages and the early modern times which remain in the Italian Peninsula still take the absolutely important part of historical archives possessed by the whole Western Europe. The preservation of the archives in the Italian Peninsula is decentralized. It is partly(mostly) because of the geopolitical fragmentation of middle and north Italy and partly because of the history of temporal unification of south Italy. But this character was lost throughout the whole modern times and it was the same even after the Unification(1861). Now organizations of various characters are preserving national archival heritages. National Central Archives in Rome and about one hundred national archives located in local administrative capitals are taking charge of archives acquired by Italian government on various grounds since 1870's as well as documents created or acquired by ancient Italian governments and archives created by the nation. Beside these series of national archives, other important archives are under the control of public institutions which are not national; for example, provincial historical archives. Of course, important personal(family, individual, company) archives are also under the control. Among the most important archives in the Italian Peninsula, there are archives of Catholic church(ecclesiastical archives). Academic concerns in the content of archives as research materials for history date back to relatively very recent times. As in the other parts of Europe, increasing number of scholars have shown systematical concerns in the documents at many national and regional archives―documents necessary for the historical reconstruction of scientific character― in Italy since the modern times and the 18th century. In the 19th century, the practice of studying archives following the 'historical method' was established. Italy's archive science progressed into a branch of history, not the technique of describing similar to that of library science.