This week I didn’t have to share the computer with one of my coworkers, so I tried to take advantage of that and actually create a dent in all the letters I am required to sort through to add keywords. While the adding keywords portion is probably just as tedious as renaming documents, the one interesting thing about it is that I actually get to learn from the documents. Adding keywords requires me to read the documents and do further research on certain terms so I understand the larger context of any document and the events happening as a whole.
However, something unique to my collection of documents is that the person who cataloged them, De Hoop Scheffer, decided to catalog these documents by document type and topic rather than just chronologically. While renaming them or trying to locate them, I found this annoying. However, while reading through them, I finally understood why he chose this form of organization for research purposes. When looking through them one after the other, I realized that each grouping really connected with each other and told a more narrative story. Topics mentioned in one letter were often brought up in others, but often with new details. For example, this past week, most of the letters and documents I have been looking at were all related to the forced expulsion of the Anabaptists from Bern.
Several of the early letters were written the Prince Elector of Bern and the Canton of Bern, asking them to be nicer to the Anabaptists because so many of them were having their property stolen from them, were being imprisoned, and being threatened to be sold into galley slavery. Later on, there are messages from the Prince and the Canton saying while they can stop imprisoning and stealing from the Anabaptists, the Anabaptists were too radical and disruptive to stay in Bern, so they have to go. Then several of the letters follow politicians and religious leaders in Bern, the Netherlands, and England trying to figure out how to move the Anabaptists to a location where they can safely practice their religion.
As I write this, I am starting to realize just how much I learned about this event from reading these primary sources. It was especially interesting to see how the situation evolved, diffused, and then intensified over the course of several years. Reading the sequence of these letters shows a lot about politics and diplomacy, but it does leave a modern reader to wonder a lot of things about word choice, for example, whether or not certain words or phrases were meant to be passive aggressive, true flattery, or simply part of social customs.
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