Writing from the archive: Henry Garnet’s powder-plot letters and archival communication

Wake, Paul (2008) Writing from the archive: Henry Garnet’s powder-plot letters and archival communication. Archival science, 8 (2). pp. 69-84. ISSN 1573-7519

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Abstract

Through a reading of the archived letters of Henry Garnet (1555–1606), Superior of the Jesuit order in England and suspected Gunpowder plotter, this article investigates the nature of the archive in relation to narrative theory. Figuring the archive as one of the number of narrating voices accrued by the individual record, I argue that models of communication such as those put forward by Roman Jakobson, Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman afford useful insights into the ways in which power is inscribed and reinscribed in the record through successive acts of reading and rewriting.