Reordering a family archive in the seventeenth century: The case of the Lante Della Rovere Archive

Résumé En

This article is centred on the reorganization of the Lante della Rovere archive executed by Antonio Corte, canon and archivist in Rome in the second half of the 1600s. Called upon by Ippolito Lante della Rovere at the height of his social ascent to reorder the family archive between 1678-80, Corte created two inventories to allow easy consultation of the documents, namely the Repertorio maggiore (Major Repertory) for ‘le scritture perpetue’ (the perpetual writings) and a Repertorio minore (Minor Repertory) for ‘quelle transitorie’ (transitory ones). The focus of this chapter is the ordering method adopted by Corte, which is minutely described in the long methodological premise to the Repertorio maggiore, in which the archivist, defining the material and formal criteria on which his work was based, repeatedly defends the adoption of chronological ordering (‘ordine del tempo’), considerably different from that by subject matter (‘ordine dei corpi’) adopted by his contemporaries.