tures of Knowledge.” This online catalogue—an ongoing project—has already produced an extensive online database of letters digitized from published and unpublished sources. The letters have been scanned and presented with metadata (transcription, writer and location, sender and location, date, language), rendering them easily searchable. In addition to presenting more than 900 letters to, from, or mentioning Rubens, EMLO includes short explanatory essays about Rubens’s life, correspondence, and its content, as well as a short list of relevant sources.
EMLO provides a repository and meeting point for data about Rubens’s correspondence with that of other early modern letter writers. Consequently, it brings scholars in fields normally somewhat removed from one another into closer contact, with searches based on names, places, and other keywords triggering surprising results and revealing little-known connections. Given Rubens’s broad range of activities and connections, his network intersected with some of the most remarkable, court, diplomatic, and
intellectual networks of his time.
The letters included in EMLO are principally those published in Rooses/Ruelens, without scans of the original archival documents. It is thus critically necessary to update and enrich the preliminary online catalogue of Rubens’s
letters by fully documenting these letters via digital photographs of the original letters and investigation of their material properties. Attention to the material qualities of Rubens’s correspondence, thus far a little studied field, would allow his letters to be considered as both objects unto themselves and vehicles carrying ideas. Scholars have recently begun to attend more closely to the material qualities of letters: what kind of paper and ink they employ, their watermarks and dimensions, the writer’s folding techniques, visual flourishes or illustrations included in the letters, handwriting, seals and crossed-out words or phrases, among other characteristics. Investigating such qualities illuminates broad questions about social history—the sourcing, cost, and distribution of paper, for example—but can also reveal letter writers’ highly personal tendencies.
In the next few years, the Rubenianum hopes to initiate the fundamental on-the-ground research and documentation of Rubens’s correspondence in order to provide an important resource for scholars and the public. Archives are cultural repositories that are ripe for new exploration, documentation, dissemination, and interpretation in our digital age. Building on the “art history of the archive” that some scholars have begun to invoke, the Rubenianum aims to contribute to an even broader “cultural history of the archive,” whereby such archival materials as letters are viewed for their own material properties and as conveyers of information, with both the material and immaterial qualities pointing outward toward a range of questions of relevance in cultural history and modern society. By viewing the
archive in this way, the Rubenianum would hope to achieve its goal of gathering, preserving, and making accessible the raw materials of Rubens’s correspondence, contextualized with documentation to facilitate study.
Abigail D. Newman is Research Advisor at the Rubenianum, Antwerp and Professor at the University of Antwerp.
1 “Met myn heer Rubbens hebbe gesproken, ende opentlijck geseght van hondert pattacons die U.L. soude willen besteden: waerop antwoorde dat geen van drye subjecten onder de twee hondert pattacons soude konnen maecken midts te vol wercks zijn. Bij soo verre U.L. Diana met twee nymphen soude begheeren geschildert te hebben, ofte eenige andere materie van twee oft dry persoonen, soude U.L. seer geerne dienen voor dese voorschreven hondert pattacons.” Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens, Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, 6 vols., Antwerp: De Backer/Buschmann, 1887–1909, vol. V, p. 333, no. DCLXXXV; MPM Arch. 142, pp. 152–53).