Doors into the Archives: material objects and document collections

This chapter explores the history of the sometimes uncomfortable and anomalous place that material objects occupy within contemporary archives. It investigates some of the ways in which they enter the archive in the first place, their relationship with other parts of the collections, and the challenges and opportunities which they present for a deeper engagement with those collections. All archives are, in one way or another, miscellaneous collections, and our sense of how material and textual deposits relate to one another has changed over time. Focussing on the non-textual objects makes it possible to understand the distinction-making process that has in many cases led to their removal to other places over time, and in doing so to explore from this angle the changing nature of our conception of archives as collections. The focus is upon two case-study groups of objects and texts which have not been so dispersed, one in Canterbury Cathedral Archives and the other in The National Archives, and I aim to use these examples to think through the relationship between things and the wider textual archive to which they relate -- the documents kept within and written about them and their owners and compilers.