# Evidentiary Authority as a System: Johann Christoph Gatterer and the Collective Making of Historical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century

## TL;DR

This paper explores how historical knowledge was created and validated in the 18th century through the interplay of text and visual media in Johann Christoph Gatterer's work.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a new framework for understanding historical evidence as a system shaped by material and medial interactions.

## Key findings

- Gatterer's work relied on a system combining verbal and visual information to convey historical evidence.
- The production of historical knowledge involved scholarly, artistic, and editorial negotiations.
- Different media shaped the system used to reproduce historical evidence.

## Abstract

How is historical evidence conveyed? How could an eighteenth‐century scholar vouch for the information stored on paper, drafted with the quill, and publicized in copperplate engravings or letterpress? In this article, I employ material and medial perspectives to reconstruct the multiple production stages of Johann Christoph Gatterer's Historia genealogica dominorum Holzschuherorum (1755) and, thereby, reveal how historical knowledge was shaped by the media that presented it. By focusing not only on the text but mainly on the engraved plates inserted within the pages of this work, I will reveal how, in the eighteenth century, historical knowledge was collectively achieved through complex scholarly, artistic, and editorial negotiations that encompassed issues of authorship and intellectual authority as well as disputes that occurred both in the making of visual evidence and the trading of authoritative editions. After exploring many drawn, handwritten, typeset, and engraved sources related to this editorial project, I argue that Gatterer's work relied on an information system based on the interplay between verbal and visual information and their relationship to the material evidence of the past. Moreover, I show how this system itself was shaped by the different media that it, in turn, used to reproduce historical evidence.