Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Medici family established libraries to ritualize their power, and recordkeeping likewise strengthened the authority of the church, the nobility, and influential mercantile families in the Italian states.
Interesting.
It also indicates the people’s recognition of the close connections between economic and political control and the documentary records that supported the rulers’ power.
Interesting
“Besides serving basic administrative and legal purposes, and providing the means to generate additional revenue for a cash-starved political regime, the production, management, and destruction of records by the Estensi bureaucracy were also used for the purposes of social control and public demonstration of authority,”
Interesting.
Because documents were so important, archives had been established “by public funds, through the generosity of princes,” under supervision of highly skilled men. “Indeed, care over the archives was given only to great and learned men,” Bonifacio continued.
Interesting
