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

Abstract

We have become accustomed to the idea that we live in the “information age,” the result of an “information revolution.” Nonetheless, some have argued that every society and age has been centered around information. Dover questions both these standpoints by placing the “information revolution” in Early Modern Europe. Drawing from his admirable research about diplomacy in the Early Modern Era, he examines Europe, not simply for the purpose of comparison but rather to explore the developing interdependence of European countries. Aided by an impressive array of primary sources, Dover traces the development of Europe as a social, political, and fundamentally informational network. The book also uses numerous secondary sources in multiple languages to reveal another network, historical scholarship, which has, in recent years, like his subject, developed around information.Patterning history and combining scholarship, the book makes “information” a critical tool for understanding the Early Modern Era. Rather than fighting against accounts of the present as the information era, Dover suggests that the current age began in the Early Modern Period. He concludes that today’s transitions, particularly the decline of paper and print and the rise of orality, may be marking the end of that long “age” and the return to something analogous to the pre-paper medieval world. Hence, Dover suggests, understanding the past will help us to understand the present better, in the process reminding us of the often-overlooked etymology of revolution.In mapping these revolutions, Dover avoids simple notions of determinism. He consults Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Change but acknowledges criticism of the determinism that she acquired from Marshall McLuhan.1 Although Dover portrays technology as a central factor, he insists that technology not only shaped but was also shaped by its social context, thereby revealing the recursive aspects of our need for information. Tools that people developed to mine, order, and store information also expanded, often dramatically, the informational landscape, which required still more tools, which further expanded the landscape, or, as Dover frequently calls it (following Desiderius Erasmus), the copia. The “worlds of paper,” in the opening chapter, provided access to information, resulting in a deluge of new devices and practices—including print, accounting, science, and communications systems, such as the post office—that ignited similarly explosive cycles.Dover’s powerful account offers a broad and intriguingly unifying analysis of Early Modern Europe as well as an incentive for research farther afield. After all, as Dover acknowledges, the origins of paper, print, and accounting were not European. Just as Dover juxtaposes past and present, drawing comparisons based on a similar analytical (in this case, informational) lens between Europe and elsewhere should also reap rewards. But as we deploy that lens, it will also be useful to subject it to analysis. A quick scan of Dover’s bibliography indicates how information has become a keyword for contemporary history. Eisenstein’s 1979 book deploys the term 50 times in 800 pages; Dover’s does the same in the first 8 pages. Between the two, the field of history seems to have undergone its own “information revolution.”Yet, central though it may be to many contemporary studies, analysis of the concept of “information” is rare in histories, which are also not always consistent in their use. Dover sometimes elides it with and sometimes distinguishes it from “data,” “facts,” “news,” “gossip,” “observation,” “knowledge,” and “wisdom,” all of which are assumed to proliferate on paper. Dover explores the concept via metaphors of distilling, cooking, aggregation, production, commodification, abstraction, distinction, and morselization. Sometimes information seems autonomous, independent of both medium and source, and sometimes it is dependent on one or both of them. It is regularly subject to quantification, though never precisely counted. Trying to present a unified picture of information is a challenge that stretches across multiple disciplines, often as members of those disciplines pursue interdisciplinary coherence. But such coherence may never be found unless each discipline more explicitly analyzes its own assumptions.