Paul M. Dover. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

Abstract

In this outstanding and deftly written synthesis, The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Paul Dover places paper at the heart of “the information revolution in early modern Europe.” An earlier generation of scholarship, chiefly inspired by groundbreaking works by Lucian Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (L’Apparition du livre, 1958) and Elizabeth Eisenstein (The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1980), located in the rise of print and the material object of the book the signal transformations that defined the media landscape of early modern Europe. Dover builds upon more recent research on topics such as archival practices, state formation, and political economy to emphasize instead the importance of paper as a substrate of communicative and preservative practice across early modern European societies. Paper’s importance as a medium, the author argues, was the underlying development that enabled information—its creation, circulation, and preservation both in print and non-print forms—to become a fundamental facet of life in early modern Europe. Drawing on scholarship in five languages, Dover brilliantly brings together a variety of adjacent historiographies on the structural transformations of the early modern period—the expansion of commerce, the origins of the fiscal-military state, and the rise of print itself—and demonstrates how paper’s expansive availability in Europe from the end of the medieval period provided the underlying condition for these developments.