Research seminar: “cleaning, repairing, ascertaining, entitling, describing, arranging and calendaring”: Working with and against 19th-century archiving at The National Archives

The 19th-century archivists at what was then the Public Record Office inherited an almost impossible task: to make sense of the accumulated paperwork of centuries of English medieval government. The choices that they made from 1840 onwards shape the ways that the medieval records can be accessed today, which in turn shape what stories can be told. This talk will explore the labour and preoccupations of the 19th-century archivist, and think through how their work continues to affect research and public engagement about the Middle Ages now.

Dr Kathryn Maude is Head of Medieval Records at The National Archives, with research expertise in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, in particular focusing on gender and sexuality. She was previously Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the American University of Beirut, where she published Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts (Boydell, 2021). She received her MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds (2011) and a PhD from King’s College London (2016).