A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

Author:Judith Flanders [Flanders, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

A writing desk belonging to either Henry VIII or Catherine of Aragon, c. 1525.

Chests were the primary repository for documents for the less exalted, or the merely prosperous, having been standard items of European furniture for households across the social spectrum for a thousand years. And, as searchable archives came into being, they began to evolve. In the Low Countries in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, some chests were raised slightly off the ground on stubby legs, to make it easier to reach down to the bottom of the storage space. In the sixteenth century, the legs were lengthened, to bring the storage area up to eye level. As a consequence, side-hinged front panels replaced the earlier rear-hinged lids, effectively becoming doors. Shelves, until now affixed only to the walls of a room, were repurposed and incorporated into the newly raised chests’ interiors, which allowed for the layered contents to be separated: no longer did everything have to be removed to reach an item at the bottom. The constraints of medieval joinery meant that these shelves were, of necessity, supported by thick posts and rails, limiting their use to larger chests, until technical innovations in the sixteenth century enabled joiners to create dozens of tiny compartments, drawers, and shelves in even the most delicate pieces.

The chest was thus utterly transformed, becoming an entirely new item of furniture: the cupboard.42 Chests had been single-unit objects; the new cupboards permitted—even encouraged—classification, division, and separation. Papers could be sorted and folded, with a contents résumé written on the outside, as had been the case in both England and Italian city-states. Placed on a shelf in a cupboard, a number of these folded and summarized documents could be flipped through in minutes, even as many administrators now routinely sat at desks and put things away in drawers.

The world was growing more organized, more bureaucratized, more reliant on paper, not merely physically, but mentally too. And with that new systematization came new ways to map the paper world, new ways to locate individual elements as and when needed. Customs, and even laws, incorporated these changes, and then came to rely on them. Finally, they came to be the very basis of the law themselves.

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