ARCHIVING THE PRESENT AND CHRONICLING FOR THE FUTURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE.

The article discusses how local middle class Europeans in certain areas were responsible for writing and maintaining local, personal chronicles from the late middle ages until the nineteenth century in locales including Bristol, England, Augsburg, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain. It presents a comparative study of such accounts of both local and persoanl news written between 1500 and 1800 in Western and Central Europe. It reports how accounts were copied and shared in various urban centers, generally among men, which encouraged others to write their own accounts.