El archivo de la villa de Madrid en la Alta Edad Moderna(1556-1606)

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation studies the Archivo de la Villa de Madrid (the municipal Archive of the Madrid Township) in the Early Modern period. The investigation is structured in the following way. On one hand, it focuses on the Madrid Town Hall archives and the municipal documentation. It studies the material evolution of the archives, the mechanisms used by the institution to recuperate public documents, the creation of inventories and the manipulation of the archival documents by the Town Council. On the other hand, it focuses on the people that took charge of the archives and of the municipal documents, principally the key-keeping aldermen, the archivists and the Council scriveners, presenting a study of their labours. Through this investigation I examine the importance that the Town Council gave to the archive. The institution had a very clear idea of what an archive should be, that is to say, a controlled, ordered and inventoried environment. However, the reality was often quite different, and improvements always came far behind the grave problems detected in the archive; they were ad hoc solutions adopted a posteriori and not a priori. In part, this was owing to the fact that the Council had no systemized theoretical principles governing the archive’s character, and considered it of secondary importance to its political and economic concerns. Thus, it can be stated that the Town Council of Madrid found itself in a pre-archival period.