Further (mis)adventures in the archives

I conceived the ambitious plan of finishing out this week (before spending the weekend at an academic workshop about religious women; yay!) by visiting the archives of Aschaffenburg, and seeing if their legal and medical texts from the region had any helpful marginalia or, at the very least, enough indications of provenance to allow me to cite them. I was led by a published catalog of manuscripts, but encountered confusion when I reached the internet site which lumped the Stifts- and Stadtbibliotheken together, and where the only e-mail address I could find was for the Stadtsarchiv. Still, I e-mailed them the evening before my visit. This wasn't listed as mandatory on the site, so I thought of it as a courteous, as well as a convenient gesture (and this approach had worked for me in Speyer and elsewhere.) Here, my optimism proved to be unfounded. After stopping by the Stadtbibliothek and finding it was not what I wanted, I followed the directions of the helpful young woman there to the Stadtsarchiv, which was located in a 16th-century episcopal residence:

Feeling a bit like Julie Andrews at the gates of the Von Trapp residence, I ventured in, having a succession of doors cheerfully held for me by an elderly man who was tethering his bike in the courtyard at the same time I was tethering mine. I waited some minutes in the empty office where signs directed me to announce myself; given the opportunity, I stated my name and business, and that I'd written. "Ach!" said the woman. "You sent that e-mail at 9:30 at night!" I humbly explained that I did realize that no one would be in the house then, and that I just thought it might be helpful to announce my intentions. "And we sent you a reply this morning," said my interlocutor. I said (attempting to sound firm while remaining appropriately supplicant) that I had checked my e-mail and hadn't seen it… "Well, because you were already traveling!" said the woman as if she'd scored a point. "Herr S.!" she called into the other room. "The young woman with the peculiar signatures is here!" While he was coming, she explained that two other persons qualified to answer such e-mails were absent today, and Herr S. was only here till 2:00, and if he hadn't been, well, then I really would have been out of luck. Herr S. joined us, and stated that the signatures I had sent were fully unknown to him. Fortunately, I was able to produce the citation of the work where I'd found the signatures. "Oh, these!" said the woman, pulling them from the shelf. "There!" I said triumphantly to Herr S., pointing to the appropriate page. "Is that not the signature?" "That is the signature," said Herr S., "but that is not our archive. The archive you want is in the castle." Before I left, I was instructed by the woman who had received me to always e-mail at least two days beforehand if it happened that I did actually need anything from them. Apologizing for the unnecessary labor I'd caused, I made my departure, and headed to the castle. Herr S. correctly observed that I couldn't miss it.

Once there, he said, I should go through the main entrance...

…and the archive would be in the rear of the courtyard on the left.

Having made my way through all this grandeur (the only other living beings were some pigeons, and a man unloading a van from a 900-year-old winery) I found myself in a cozy little room lined with shelves and occupied by two women who offered a chorus of how-could-they-help-me. Once again I stated my business. The friendly librarians acquired a deer-in-the-headlights look. Had I written ahead about these manuscripts and made an appointment? I explained, not without blushing and apologies, that I'd tried to do so, but had landed by the wrong address. "Oh, well… in that case I'm not sure…" said one. "We're very small here," said the other, "and we'd need an appointment so we'd know how to fit you into the office with us, and when the right persons would be here…" "You'll be here for a while?" asked the first (I mentally dubbed them Lydia and Bessie after two endearing fairies in a favorite children's book.) I explained that I lived in Mainz, but was there for the foreseeable future, so could travel. "Maybe we have something in the library that you could use," suggested Bessie, "since you've come all this way." I identified my dissertation topic and the themes I was interested in. "Oh," they said in unison. "Well then… I'm afraid we don't have anything like what the libraries in Mainz will have…" We all agreed that I would write and make an appointment, and exchanged cordial Auf Wiedersehens… and I headed back to the train station after 90 minutes of travel, 90 minutes in a Bavarian city, 2 palatial residences, and no archival work. On the bright side, there was an ancient café near the train station with excellent coffee, and the Darmstadt archive lies halfway between Aschaffenburg and Mainz, so I spent a productive afternoon there.