Provenance in 19th-Century Europe: Research Practice and Concept
The purpose of this project is to analyze provenance, as a historically contingent concept and research practice that emerged in 19th-century Europe. Recently proclaimed to be a science in its own right, few scholarly terms are as topical as provenance: the history of an object told through its chain of locations and owners. Provenance has a history of its own, however, and the project argues that, while the art market and nationalism are important, scholars representing regions with a suppressed past and present are key to understanding the rise of provenance and its research, by examining the cases of Beda Dudík (Moravia/Austria), Carl Schirren (the Baltics/Livonia/Russia), and Franz Hipler (Warmia/East Prussia), ca. 1850–1900. Due to Swedish regents’ looting in the 17th century, Dudík, Schirren, and Hipler were dependent on foreign archives and libraries when researching regional history. The project’s main sources are their publications describing this provenance research. Theoretically, provenance is understood as a process, determined through and affected by practices such as locating, classifying, and moving manuscripts, documents, and other historical sources. It became very important to regional historians, as determining provenance equaled existence. By merging regional inferiority and transnational dependencies, diverse institutional settings, and political, religious, and scholarly ambitions, these cases reveal the needs and encounters that explain provenance.
Final report
The original purpose of this project was to investigate provenance as a concept and research practice that emerged in 19th-century Europe. Over the course of the project, this aim has been expanded to also include provenance as an organizational principle, which gradually came to be implemented in European archives during the 19th century. The project was based on three case studies of regional actors who depended on sources in foreign archives and libraries to conduct their historiographical research: Beda Dudík (Moravia/Austria), Carl Schirren (Livonia/Russia), and Franz Hipler (Ermland/East Prussia), between the years 1850–1900. These historians served as entry points into the complex regional contexts they represented and derived from. Over time, however, the project came to explore broader and more fundamental questions concerning representativity, power, and the material resources of historical scholarship in contrast to historians’ perceptions of the past. This becomes particularly evident in the presentation of the project’s key outcomes below.
The project began in 2021, and its implementation was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, only source material in Swedish archives or available online could be compiled and analyzed. In 2022 and 2023, the planned archival trips to the German Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and the Archiv der Erzdiözese Ermland in the Polish city of Olsztyn were carried out. At the midterm review, the evaluation group recommended placing greater emphasis on the theoretical aspects of the project. Consequently, the remaining part of the project period was devoted to developing the theorization of provenance and the absence that gave rise to provenance research.
The project’s most important outcomes are, firstly, that it explains why and how provenance research emerged in Europe during the 19th century. Secondly, it demonstrates that the need for provenance as a concept, research practice and organizational practice was caused by archivists’ and historians’ varied experiences of absence. The project therefore shows how this absence can be theorized and analyzed. Thirdly, the project problematizes marginalization, power and the hegemony of the national perspective in historical research. This is done by studying regional actors who generally belonged to an educated elite, while simultaneously representing outdated power structures and a historiography that struggled to assert itself against competing national narratives.
Using Beda Dudík’s provenance research in Sweden (1851) and Rome (1853) as a starting point, the project highlights the indispensability of this research practice for scholars striving to underpin regional historiography. By analyzing Dudík’s classification practices, the project shows that provenance was—and remains—a changeable and context-dependent category. Scientific historiography depended on sources in archives, and provenance research was driven by regional actors’ lack of historical resources. Provenance research was a public concern: both Dudík and Schirren wrote about their travels and discoveries in the daily newspapers, while Hipler conducted most of his provenance research via intermediaries, as evidenced by his extensive correspondence. All three actors testify to a novel view of cultural heritage, which, due to the revolutions and wars of the 19th century, became public property to which the people were entitled. At the same time, manuscripts and archival documents were collectively fetishized due to the turmoil of the era.
This brings us to European experiences of absence: in archives and of archives. These were common from the late 18th century onward, as European archives were centralized, nationalized, and threatened by extensive destruction and confiscation in connection with revolutions and wars. The project therefore analyzes what this absence entailed and how it can be theorized. The latter is based on archival theoretical discussions, according to which absence can be understood as a silence of archives, and how fantasies about archival documents can have creative effects. The project contributes to this theorization by emphasizing the material aspects of absence: the archivist or historian who experienced absence generally attempted to materialize it, for example by conducting provenance research, negotiating restitutions, and compiling source publications. These efforts have undoubtedly generated new knowledge about archives, their previous relocations, and material losses. At the same time, the project shows how provenance research could lead to further losses, of both knowledge and documents, and that restitutions could cause material abundance as well as collections falling into oblivion.
By focusing on regional and transnational actors, the project raises fundamental questions about marginalization and power in historical research in a new way. These German-speaking actors belonged to the educated elite of society in Central and Eastern Europe, while experiencing that their imagined communities were subordinated to or threatened by other groups’ national or imperial authority. Influenced by gender and postcolonial perspectives, the project makes visible geographical and scientific conditions of power within Europe, and alternative historiographical narratives. The project highlights, not least, how this was intertwined with the institutional structure of historiography. According to Peter Fritzsche (2005), strong national institutions—such as archives—have shaped historical thinking by excluding or concealing evidence that could threaten the idea of a shared past. Actively choosing to discard national perspectives in research not only changes the kind of history that can be written, it also exposes the extensive limitations of national historiography.
In conclusion, the project’s results show that studies of regional or transnational actors, their historiographical claims, and their absent sources—in relation to national collections, geopolitical conflicts, and colonial legacies within European—are essential for understanding the emergence of the concept and practice of researching of provenance. Finally, the project connects with the use of provenance in today’s society. An important context of relevance is found in the natural sciences, such as biomedicine. The European understanding provenance and its research, as it emerged and developed from the 19th century onward, are scientific practices that over time have moved from the worlds of archives, historiography and art, via archaeology and anthropology, to biomedicine and computer science. It is thus something as unusual as a concept and method from the humanities that has come to be applied in scientific and technical research. This circumstance motivates a history of science and ideas that disregard the boundary between the humanities and the natural sciences.
The project has generated new research questions concerning the relationship between absence, knowledge, and ignorance. The project argues that absence can be seen as an analytical opportunity rather than an obstacle. Absence studies could serve as an innovative interdisciplinary field for researchers interested in how the material resources and institutional infrastructure of knowledge interact with ideas, fantasies, and lies about the same. Such studies could yield results and perspectives that would be valuable for current debates about what constitutes facts and opinions in political discourse.
The project has been continuously presented at conferences, workshops, and seminars, both in Sweden and abroad. Two examples are “The Archives and Timescales of Heimat History: Moravia and Livonia,” at the Lifetimes Conference in Oslo 2023, and “Provenance and the Multiple Timescales of Nineteenth-Century Archives and Historiography” at the European Society for the History of Science in Brussels 2022. A keynote lecture on the archival fragments of the Teutonic Order in the Swedish National Archives was given in 2024 at the conference Die Archive des Deutschen Ordens in Berlin, and the lecture will be published in 2026. To conclude to the project, the workshop “Collections, Provenance and Narrative: A Workshop in Archive and Library History” was organized in June 2025 at the Hagströmer Library, in collaboration with Hjalmar Fors. International collaboration has also taken place through the working and reading group “Identity in Histories of Science, Medicine, and Heritage,” together with Lara Keuck and Jenny Bangham. We are currently co-authoring an article on the mobilization of identity in science, medicine, and heritage contexts. I am responsible for a section on provenance research dealing with Human Remains.
In addition to the articles and book chapters written within the framework of the project, a book manuscript with the working title Provenance – A History of Absence, Materiality and Science has been compiled, with approximately 20 percent remaining to be written. A book proposal was presented at the History of Science Seminar in Uppsala in June 2023, and a revised version will be discussed at two higher seminars in November 2025: Museology at Umeå University and History of Ideas at Södertörn University.
The project began in 2021, and its implementation was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, only source material in Swedish archives or available online could be compiled and analyzed. In 2022 and 2023, the planned archival trips to the German Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and the Archiv der Erzdiözese Ermland in the Polish city of Olsztyn were carried out. At the midterm review, the evaluation group recommended placing greater emphasis on the theoretical aspects of the project. Consequently, the remaining part of the project period was devoted to developing the theorization of provenance and the absence that gave rise to provenance research.
The project’s most important outcomes are, firstly, that it explains why and how provenance research emerged in Europe during the 19th century. Secondly, it demonstrates that the need for provenance as a concept, research practice and organizational practice was caused by archivists’ and historians’ varied experiences of absence. The project therefore shows how this absence can be theorized and analyzed. Thirdly, the project problematizes marginalization, power and the hegemony of the national perspective in historical research. This is done by studying regional actors who generally belonged to an educated elite, while simultaneously representing outdated power structures and a historiography that struggled to assert itself against competing national narratives.
Using Beda Dudík’s provenance research in Sweden (1851) and Rome (1853) as a starting point, the project highlights the indispensability of this research practice for scholars striving to underpin regional historiography. By analyzing Dudík’s classification practices, the project shows that provenance was—and remains—a changeable and context-dependent category. Scientific historiography depended on sources in archives, and provenance research was driven by regional actors’ lack of historical resources. Provenance research was a public concern: both Dudík and Schirren wrote about their travels and discoveries in the daily newspapers, while Hipler conducted most of his provenance research via intermediaries, as evidenced by his extensive correspondence. All three actors testify to a novel view of cultural heritage, which, due to the revolutions and wars of the 19th century, became public property to which the people were entitled. At the same time, manuscripts and archival documents were collectively fetishized due to the turmoil of the era.
This brings us to European experiences of absence: in archives and of archives. These were common from the late 18th century onward, as European archives were centralized, nationalized, and threatened by extensive destruction and confiscation in connection with revolutions and wars. The project therefore analyzes what this absence entailed and how it can be theorized. The latter is based on archival theoretical discussions, according to which absence can be understood as a silence of archives, and how fantasies about archival documents can have creative effects. The project contributes to this theorization by emphasizing the material aspects of absence: the archivist or historian who experienced absence generally attempted to materialize it, for example by conducting provenance research, negotiating restitutions, and compiling source publications. These efforts have undoubtedly generated new knowledge about archives, their previous relocations, and material losses. At the same time, the project shows how provenance research could lead to further losses, of both knowledge and documents, and that restitutions could cause material abundance as well as collections falling into oblivion.
By focusing on regional and transnational actors, the project raises fundamental questions about marginalization and power in historical research in a new way. These German-speaking actors belonged to the educated elite of society in Central and Eastern Europe, while experiencing that their imagined communities were subordinated to or threatened by other groups’ national or imperial authority. Influenced by gender and postcolonial perspectives, the project makes visible geographical and scientific conditions of power within Europe, and alternative historiographical narratives. The project highlights, not least, how this was intertwined with the institutional structure of historiography. According to Peter Fritzsche (2005), strong national institutions—such as archives—have shaped historical thinking by excluding or concealing evidence that could threaten the idea of a shared past. Actively choosing to discard national perspectives in research not only changes the kind of history that can be written, it also exposes the extensive limitations of national historiography.
In conclusion, the project’s results show that studies of regional or transnational actors, their historiographical claims, and their absent sources—in relation to national collections, geopolitical conflicts, and colonial legacies within European—are essential for understanding the emergence of the concept and practice of researching of provenance. Finally, the project connects with the use of provenance in today’s society. An important context of relevance is found in the natural sciences, such as biomedicine. The European understanding provenance and its research, as it emerged and developed from the 19th century onward, are scientific practices that over time have moved from the worlds of archives, historiography and art, via archaeology and anthropology, to biomedicine and computer science. It is thus something as unusual as a concept and method from the humanities that has come to be applied in scientific and technical research. This circumstance motivates a history of science and ideas that disregard the boundary between the humanities and the natural sciences.
The project has generated new research questions concerning the relationship between absence, knowledge, and ignorance. The project argues that absence can be seen as an analytical opportunity rather than an obstacle. Absence studies could serve as an innovative interdisciplinary field for researchers interested in how the material resources and institutional infrastructure of knowledge interact with ideas, fantasies, and lies about the same. Such studies could yield results and perspectives that would be valuable for current debates about what constitutes facts and opinions in political discourse.
The project has been continuously presented at conferences, workshops, and seminars, both in Sweden and abroad. Two examples are “The Archives and Timescales of Heimat History: Moravia and Livonia,” at the Lifetimes Conference in Oslo 2023, and “Provenance and the Multiple Timescales of Nineteenth-Century Archives and Historiography” at the European Society for the History of Science in Brussels 2022. A keynote lecture on the archival fragments of the Teutonic Order in the Swedish National Archives was given in 2024 at the conference Die Archive des Deutschen Ordens in Berlin, and the lecture will be published in 2026. To conclude to the project, the workshop “Collections, Provenance and Narrative: A Workshop in Archive and Library History” was organized in June 2025 at the Hagströmer Library, in collaboration with Hjalmar Fors. International collaboration has also taken place through the working and reading group “Identity in Histories of Science, Medicine, and Heritage,” together with Lara Keuck and Jenny Bangham. We are currently co-authoring an article on the mobilization of identity in science, medicine, and heritage contexts. I am responsible for a section on provenance research dealing with Human Remains.
In addition to the articles and book chapters written within the framework of the project, a book manuscript with the working title Provenance – A History of Absence, Materiality and Science has been compiled, with approximately 20 percent remaining to be written. A book proposal was presented at the History of Science Seminar in Uppsala in June 2023, and a revised version will be discussed at two higher seminars in November 2025: Museology at Umeå University and History of Ideas at Södertörn University.