Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture

Abstract

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, xii + 200 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-230-23976-0This book does not quite live up to its billing, and as a collection it is heavily weighted towards the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and to Elizabethan England in particular. Nevertheless, it is a timely contribution to what is clearly becoming an inter- esting field of enquiry, and one that has been pioneered by scholars of the Tudor age. After decades of neglect early modern diplomacy has begun to garner renewed interest, albeit from the perspective of cultural rather than political history, and it is in this spirit that this volume has been produced. The editors explicitly seek to avoid political and military history in favour of what they call 'the textured background to the early modern embassy' (p. 7), and they are interested in the 'backdrop' to formal diplomatic activities, and in a range of activities relating to information gathering, cultural exchange, and the material world. Their goal is to understand how these practices shaped 'the events and milieux in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' (p. 2). The results seem to fall into three categories.One group of essays investigate a practice that was intimately associated with diplo- macy: intelligence gathering. In their analyses of the circulation of information in Elizabethan England, for example, Jason Powell, Robyn Adams and Stephen Alford con- centrate on the kinds of shadowy characters who were involved in pseudo-diplomatic activity. They appreciate that the Elizabethan state was dependent on semi-private networks of patronage and employment, and they demonstrate that many of the characters who were involved in gathering and circulating intelligence occupied ill-defined roles. Some were independent adventurers, some were politically committed, and some were financially rewarded. Some of them were attached to embassies, some of them used intelligence as a means of cementing their positions within patronage networks, and some of them secured promotion and preferment. Adams's study of William Herle, for example, reveals someone who occupied a 'grey area' by combining the roles of 'diplomat, agent, intelligencer and spy' (p. 64), and who became the point of contact between Lord Burghley and the Earl of Leicester, and the 'hub of information exchange' (p. 71). Alford, meanwhile, uses an exploration of such practices to argue that contemporaries did not draw clear distinctions between domestic and foreign intelligence, or between the gathering and assessment of intelligence and the process of policy-making.A second group of essays deal with the processes and practices involved in letter- writing. As Mark Netzloff usefully reminds us, early modern diplomacy was as much about the epistolary arts as it was about the craft of state, and a series of contributions relate to the nature and role of letter-writing in a diplomatic context. James Daybell explores the role of women in the circulation of news, in court diplomacy and in Catholic communication networks, while Netzloff examines the 'everyday matter ' of ambassadorial life in the household of Sir Henry Wotton, and 'the material practices and social dynamics of letter- writing' (p. 156). Alan Stewart offers a particularly intriguing discussion of the 'materiality' of diplomatic correspondence, and his study of Francis Bacon's 'bi-literal' cipher empha- sises the importance that was placed not just on rhetorical and textual skills but also on careful handwriting. …