ABSTRACT

The evolution of the Swiss Confederation from a local alliance among Imperial estates to a national entity on the European stage can be mapped by tracking the way that federal business was archived from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The original Diet (Tagsatzung) established after the allied cantons gained shared territories in the Aargau in the 1420s lacked the personnel or institutional identity necessary to undertake any archival activity. As the Confederation gained institutional definition and became a regional player in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire and of Central Europe, however, documentary practices became increasingly routinized, and stable federal collections began forming in parallel in the archives of the leading cantons. Consisting of durable representations of ongoing debates and negotiations and preserved in documents (Abschiede) that were circulated differentially depending on the matters and parties involved, the emerging confederal archive was distributed in that no single location possessed a complete version, and imaginary in that contemporaries regarded it as a comprehensive unity despite its very real physical and material fragmentation. In the later sixteenth century, a separate archival collection reflecting the Confederation’s shared business emerged in the administrative centre of Baden (Aargau), reflecting the consolidating identity of Confederation as it moved out of the Empire’s orbit. Repeated efforts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to complete and protect this collection referred to it as an archive despite its unusual characteristics. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, projects to create a Swiss national archive, either virtually or in print, culminated in the printed Eidgenössische Abschiede that created a documentary record of a Swiss state since the thirteenth century that had never existed historically.

摘要

瑞士联邦从帝国庄园之间的地方联盟到欧洲舞台上的国家实体的演变可以通过追踪 15 世纪至 19 世纪联邦事务的归档方式来描绘。最初的饮食（Tagsatzung）是在 1420 年代盟军各州在阿尔高地区获得共享领土后建立的，缺乏开展任何档案活动所需的人员或机构身份。然而，随着联邦获得了制度上的定义并成为神圣罗马帝国和中欧政治中的区域参与者，文献实践变得越来越常规化，稳定的联邦收藏开始在主要州的档案中同时形成。由正在进行的辩论和谈判的持久陈述组成，并保存在文件中（Abschiede），根据所涉及的事项和各方的不同而有不同的流通，新兴的邦联档案的分布是因为没有一个地点拥有完整的版本，并且想象中的同时代人将其视为一个全面的统一体，尽管它的物理和物质碎片非常真实。十六世纪后期，巴登（阿尔高）行政中心出现了反映联邦共同事务的独立档案馆，反映了联邦在脱离帝国轨道后不断巩固的身份。尽管其具有不同寻常的特征，但十七世纪和十八世纪为完成和保护这一收藏而进行的反复努力将其称为档案。在十八世纪末和十九世纪，创建瑞士国家档案馆的计划，Eidgenössische Abschiede创造了自十三世纪以来历史上从未存在过的瑞士国家的文献记录。