So the Dean’s Media Network wanted me to contribute something on the X Factor. But I thought the news about Darlene Love was more important:

Last weekend over 20 million British television viewers tuned in to watch two young women and six young men compete to earn the title of X Factor Winner 2010. No matter how unpolished these performers were before they entered the competition, by the time they had reached the final, both their on-stage and off-stage personae had been well honed by publicity staff, stylists and music consultants, all under the direction of über-guru, Simon Cowell. Throughout the competition, they have sung the songs they have been given to sing, worn the clothes they have been given to wear, and generally behaved for the media in the way they have been instructed, all to fulfill a well-defined niche: Cher, the teen minx with attitude; One Direction, the modest, wholesome band of brothers; Rebecca, the wallflower single mum connecting with her inner diva; and Matt, the unpretentious and sensitive labourer determined to get his break.

Clearly, as finalists on the most widely-viewed reality show in the UK, these singers have had a huge amount of publicity. If their voices don’t make them distinct, their faces are instantly recognizable – if not from television exposure, due to their almost daily appearance in the tabloids – and their personae are well known and appealing to their target audiences. Consequently, regardless of whether or not they have won, they will enjoy (if that’s the right word) the rewards of the limelight and the chance to continue in pop music at a very high level, should their talent and their ability to navigate the business warrant it.

But was it always thus? By coincidence, today (Thursday 16 December) the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its 2011 inductees, those musicians who have been deemed by the music business establishment worthy of the honor of being included in the Great and the Good of rock music. The list is uncontestably impressive: Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, Neil Diamond, Dr John, Leon Russell, and producers Jac Holman and Art Rupe. And (as usual), one woman, 72-year-old gospel singer Darlene Love.

Love’s name is not familiar to many in Britain, nor is her face – not even to the baby-boomer generation who bought records that were made million-sellers by her remarkable voice. Love – who sang for Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, and Tom Jones; whose group, the Blossoms, appeared weekly on Shindig! as the house back-up group; who (as part of Phil Spector’s stable of heavily exploited singers) sang an uncredited lead on The Crystals’ “He’s A Rebel,” which reached the No 1 spot on Billboard – only achieved some kind of national recognition in the 1980s, after spending years out of the limelight, taking cleaning jobs to make ends meet while her records earnt Spector millions in royalties. In 1986, David Letterman invited her to perform her signature track from Spector’s 1963 A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” live on his last TV broadcast before Christmas – a performance that has been repeated annually ever since. But even once returned to the cultural consciousness, Love has remained unacknowledged by her peers until now.

There have been strong rumours that, for many years, Spector prevented Love – and her fellow Spector artists, the Ronettes – from being nominated as Hall of Fame Inductees, wielding power as a member of the museum’s Board of Governors. Now serving a life sentence for murder, Spector has lost his influence, and the music business has regained its pop muses: the Ronettes were inducted in 2007. A girl group first topped the charts in 1961: fifty years on, rock seems to have begun to realize how important girl groups were, not just for their contribution to music itself, but as role models for working-class and non-white girls who wanted to emulate their success.

It’s hard to imagine Cowell turning down any publicity opportunity for his singers, however ephemeral their success might turn out to be. Nevertheless, the X Factor finalists should take a long, hard look at Love and what her career can teach them about the fickleness of the business, about power (when you don’t have it), about longevity and about artistic integrity. Time will tell whether the X Factor’s instant stardom really is a replacement for Love and co’s hard graft. But those that decry the X Factor as the totemic symbol of all that is bad about popular culture might also take time to consider what cultural change was wrought by Love, Ronnie Spector and all, even if at the time they were only cogs in the machine.

Was it worth it? Almost certainly.

Two days of archival trudging; eyes that won’t focus no matter what pair of glasses I wear; a back that hurts like a bastard from perching on an ancient and weary archive chair; and a wild goose chase that currently features the goose waggling its feathery behind as it disappears behind a convent door. But I have turned over all the obvious stones, and some of the less obvious ones, and I can now say with confidence that the Este archives don’t readily have the answer to my “research question.”

Oh, I have found Francesco Viola, and I have found Suor Leonora, but not in the same place at the same time. I’ve even found Giaches de Wert clinging to a duchess’s petticoats – metaphorically speaking, and not the duchess you might think – but I didn’t find what I’d hoped to find, and that’s a pity.

The lesson here, dear reader, is that archival work is about Serendipity, aka the archive angel, but she doesn’t like to be rushed. Sometimes serendipity is about not finding things, because it may be that you’re not meant to find them yet. So I can’t get all upset about spending money on a plane ticket and a hotel because a) I don’t have to lose any more sleep over what might be in the archive, and b) just because I haven’t found what I wanted doesn’t mean that I will never find it, and doesn’t prove that it doesn’t exist.

Also, the archive angel just may be, just may be, telling me to just finish the book, already. When I consider all the leads I could be chasing, and the other archives and libraries I could be visiting, in order to get a better picture of just what was happening in Ferrarese convents in the late sixteenth century, I start thinking that I don’t just need an apartment in Modena, I need one in Ferrara, Florence, Mantua and Rome, too. When it comes down to it, I don’t need a break anymore, I need perspective.

In the course of the trip I’ve got know my girls just a little bit better, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it? For instance, I now know that the Duchess of Urbino was a vicarious benefice collector, and seems to have been only too willing to plead on behalf of her pet priests to gain another small source of income. And that the Dowager Duchess of Mantua and her daughter, the Duchess of Ferrara, plotted together to keep the family peace during an unseemly row between their respective dukes – just doing what the women of the family have done for centuries. Objectivist scholars might be horrified at the notion of “getting to know” the research object, but I’m well used to horrifying certain subsets of the academic community. And it helps me stay interested – if I didn’t think they were real women, I might not care so much.

So when I finally downed tools for the day, I went and got a nice glass of prosecco, and was unexpectedly rewarded with a very, very late lunch. Really, it’s not so bad.

And you never know what I might find tomorrow.

Florence, city of mood swings. As the train pulls out and I set off towards Ferrara (hours later than planned, thanks to the Ferrovie dello Stato) I am surprised at how ambivalent I still feel. In the past three days I have been hurled wildly between joy, deep frustration, wonder, irritation, serenity and impatience. True, it hasn’t helped that the Biblioteca Ariostea is calling me and I’m worried about getting there before the final ‘distributione’ today (not knowing what awaits me tomorrow), and that I have been suffering from a delicate stomach since Monday. But that shouldn’t cancel out the obvious beauty and meraviglie around me, the pleasure of finding some outstanding stuff in the archives and the luxury of staying in a borrowed apartment right in the centre of town, which – incidentally – was oustandingly beautiful itself.

But yesterday evening, as I was given a tour around the I Tatti villa and gardens by the superbissima, eccellentissima Kathryn Bosi – and afterwards as we sat outside a local bar, nibbling excellent antipasti and drinking chilled wine from glasses the size of Eastern Europe – I identified a possible source of my nagging, subclinical discontent.

In all the years I’ve worked and studied in Italy, the closest I’ve ever come to technology – apart from the library OPACs, which are very useful no matter where you are – is the new electronic ordering system at the Archivio di Stato in Mantova, which I encountered for the first time in October. Saying that, though, I still had to work out what to order by looking in catalogues handwritten in the eighteenth century. In Modena and Ferrara, Parma and Mantova, the libraries and archives retain an air of the past – they are housed in old palazzi, there is a sense that, when you order a book or a busta, the archivists go and find them on the same bookshelves they have been on for centuries, the armadi still stamped with the roman numerals that gave rise to the original catalogue numbers. And because of this – rightly or wrongly – it doesn’t feel difficult to connect with the documents’ histories, as the buildings and processes give you a continuity with the past.

The Archivio di Stato in Florence, however, is in a large modern building with Pompidou-like external staircases, and the reading room is a masterpiece of contemporary, IKEA-like design, with little offices around the side, partitioned not by walls but by tinted glass. The catalogues aren’t falling out of decrepit bindings, the light in the separate reference room is harsh, it’s all clean, efficient, and ever so slightly soulless by comparison to the archivi emiliani. And while American money is clearly responsible for so much that is good in the preservation of priceless art and artefacts in Florence, it seemed to me that there, in the archives, the process was dragging the past into the present rather than enabling the present to reach into the past. And if you visit the convent of the Murate, there is a visible manifestation of this in the way they have converted the cells into apartments.

Although I was dismayed at the loss, when the British Library moved, of the spectacular Reading Room, and elite intimacy of the North Library (oh, the delightful frisson of unexpectedly meeting eyes – and minds – with a scholarly innamorato amongst the brass fittings, tinted lampshades and ancient wooden reading cubicles), the new rooms at Euston at least retain something of the old magic, with the open access books still there in Rare Books and Music, and the curiously antique, dimmed feel of Manuscript Room. But the Sala di Consultatione at ASF has all the charm of a corporate hot-desking office, or an unusually, preternaturally quiet call-centre. Not that I get up to flirtatious academic assignations these days, modern matron that I am, but a little air of romantic and serendipitous possibility makes the archive angel happy.

What brought this train of thought into focus was the slightly wistful look on Kathryn’s face, as she led me through the newly fitted music library at I Tatti, which although very classy, smart and undoubtedly easy to use, has the same appearance of air-conditioned efficiency, effortlessly sliding drawers of CDs and adjustable shelves instead of baroque haphazardness. And as I thought later about the buzz in the library world being all towards digital delivery here, databasing there – making her redoubtable skills as a collector, gathering materials together and putting them in one place, seem imminently imperilled – my mind skitted back to last week’s visit to the Warburg Institute Library. There it is all open access, a lovingly, generously assembled resource with obscure (but essential) essay collections cheek-by-jowl with eighteenth-century reference books. When seemingly disconnected materials are brought together, that’s when serendipity happens. The researcher’s eye can’t be caught by information stored in a database; Google only works according to search terms, and you have to know what you’re looking for before you find it.

Yes, digitize; it’s essential for all sorts of reasons. Yes, catalogue; we can’t do our job without it. Yes, tidy and organize, but think very hard about anything you might throw away, not just in terms of material but in terms of ethos. Time and motion studies, cost-benefit analyses might not show the whole picture.

But with what seems like an underlying aim to make scholarship more efficient (and therefore even more end-driven, rather than means-guided) two new features of Americo-Florentine academia give me hope. First, that there is money to provide a few students per year six months of reading time. Come to Florence and read. Don’t write, read. What a good idea! Then there are the short-term fellowships for mothers, finally, finally, recognising that women with young families can’t just up sticks for a year, leaving captious and needy children behind in the care of bewildered husbands and grandparents, or make their spouses (who still probably earn more than they do) take unpaid leave from their jobs for a year. The powers that be at I Tatti should be congratulated for their foresight and generosity, and for their plain common sense. Students that read, women that can compromise. Bravissimi!

And now, here I am in Ferrara, and two hours before closing time in the Ariostea. Gloriously unmechanised, wooden-drawered, hand-written (with a nibbed pen) card catalogues, dead dude (Ariosto) in the corner, rare books in lattice-doored shelves, stepladders, and portraits of countless cardinals. But…and…free wifi and a place to plug in my computer. Ah, it’s great to be back.