This new book will provide a ground breaking discussion of a major but little considered issue - the silence of the archive: why archives, sometimes seen as the repositories of truth, often fail to satisfy users because they do not contain information which they expect to find. Silences range from details of individuals' lives to records of state oppression or of intelligence operations. The book brings together ideas from a wide range of fields, from contemporary history through family history research to Shakespearian studies. It describes why there are these silences, what the impact of them is, how researchers have responded to them and what the silence of the archive means for researchers in the digital age.