What is it about?
In early modern Europe, students and scholars kept small “friendship albums” in which friends and teachers wrote messages, added drawings, or shared mottos. These books were not just souvenirs. They helped their owners show who they were, what they believed, and whom they knew. By studying these albums, we can better understand how people between the 16th and 18th centuries balanced friendship, reputation, and privacy.
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Why is it important?
This study is unique because it examines early modern friendship albums not only as historical curiosities, but as tools for managing identity, reputation, and privacy. By connecting these albums to broader debates about egodocuments and the history of privacy, it offers a new way of understanding how people balanced personal intimacy and public image centuries before the digital age. The topic is especially timely, as modern societies continue to struggle with similar tensions between private life and public self-presentation on social media. By showing that these concerns are not new, the chapter invites readers to reflect on the long history of networking and self-fashioning. This perspective may attract historians, cultural scholars, and readers interested in the deeper roots of today’s privacy debates.
Perspectives
Working on this chapter allowed me to bring together my long-standing interest in early modern academic networks and my fascination with ego-documents as sources of lived experience. I was particularly struck by how closely the dynamics of alba amicorum resemble modern forms of curated self-presentation, which made the material feel unexpectedly contemporary. For me, this publication is also an invitation to look at seemingly modest archival objects and recognize in them complex stories about identity, friendship, and reputation.
Robert Tomczak
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Privacy and Publicity in Early Modern Alba Amicorum from Central Europe, January 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004749849_010.
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