Information and communication
Team leaders :
Professor Francisco Bethencourt (Portugal)
Dr. Florike Egmond (The Netherlands)
Between 1400 and 1700, Europe revolutionized its methods for collecting, storing, retrieving, communicating and concealing information (there was a remarkable development of codes and ciphers at this time). The problem is to understand if this revolution helped shape European cultural identity through constant diversification at local, regional and national levels.
This field of research implies careful analysis of the production and circulation of texts and images concerning different parts of Europe. It will examine the social, religious, linguistic, economic or political obstacles to cultural exchanges (in other words, cultural frontiers), as well as the processes of diffusion, appropriation, and adaptation of different models (along the lines of the work of Michel de Certeau and of anthropologists concerned with cultural translation). This internal approach will he balanced by a close analysis of the information concerning other continent, including such sources as maps, letters, reports, travel literature, geographic surveys, collections of art, descriptions of fauna and flora. In our perspective, reconstituting this activity of information and classification helps us to understand the construction of an idea of Europe developed through interaction with other regions of the world.
It will be necessary to select a few subjects from this vast field, privileging such new trends as the commercialization of information, and new institutions favoring interchange, such as academies, resident ambassadors, stock exchanges and learned journals. The theme will he divided into three interrelated sections - structures, sociability and surveys/tools -, just to facilitate our work. The central axis, common to these sections, may be described as a historical sociology of knowledge, showing through concrete case-studies how knowledge was socially produced, used, and transformed.
3.1 .Structures
This section will examine the main organizations dealing with the creation, circulation and storage of information. We are not primarily interested in the content of these written, visual and oral sources as with the basic structures responsible for their production and manipulation. From our point of view, the diffusion of these structures across Europe, although exhibiting novel forms of diversification, also carried with them some common features which could be labelled as cultural models. We will use methods taken from the sciences of organization, the history of education and the history of communication.
- Printing houses, bookshops, archives and libraries are some of these main structures where information was fixed, produced, stored, sold, read, and even discussed. The main purpose is to identify centres and peripheries of the new industry of information, but we will also study new technologies, new materials, new ways of selling and marketing, new techniques of information retrieval (catalogues, indices, inventories), new architectural forms (e. g. for libraries), and new furniture.
- Schools and universities provided environments encouraging both the reproduction of knowledge and the development of new areas of human inquiry. Besides the study of different curricula, it is important to compare the development of new disciplines and new fields. Exchange between universities will be studied together with an organizational model which was adopted throughout Europe. We will also analyze the competition between the production of knowledge inside and outside the universities.
- Correspondence between individuals is crucial to understand the exchange of culture both within and between European countries. Correspondence also has an official side, where dispatches, orders, and reports cross different administrative and military networks, gathering information and spreading standard practices. The establishment of formal circuits of distribution was a major achievement in the process of linking different centres with distant peripheries inside Europe.
3.2. Sociability
This section will address the problems of cultural frontiers, informal networks, meeting places and centres of diffusion, seeking to analysis the social bases of the major European cultural configurations and forms of exchange. It should produce a general picture of the main trends in communication, illuminating forms of resistance as well as tensions between official and unofficial culture, literate and illiterate traditions and cultures, centres and peripheries of cultural production, old and new central systems of values. Approaches range from the history of popular culture to the history of literacy and science, from the history of oral culture to the history of the book and journalism. Special attention will be paid to :
- Frontiers of orality and literacy, especially those separating men from women, urban groups from peasants, Jews or Greek Orthodox from Latin Christians, Protestants from Catholics. The approach to be followed here is that of historical anthropology using as well folk-index as criminal records, focusing on pragmatic literacy, the uses of writing for the illiterate, and what Jack Goody has called the interface of the oral and the written. Central and Eastern Europe might be privileged here, to compensate for the attention given to western Europe in other sections.
- The place of different forms of communication (societies, correspondence, journals, books) in the formation of the European Republic of letters, with book reviews (a 17th-century invention) and reports of experiments as concrete examples. The earlier diffusion of the printing press across Europe raises the problem of the adaptation of the same model to different contexts. The focus will be on the social groups involved, on female readers, and on the kinds of information exchanged between European countries.
- Forms of clandestine communication and their diffusion, comparing and contrasting the spread of heresy, sedition, and pornography (an invention of the early modern period, with Aretino among the pioneers). Special attention will be given to the channels of communication (private presses, manuscript newsletters, smugglers routes) and the agents involved (were they committed to the cause, or profiteers ? ).
- Centres of the import and export of different kinds of information deserve separate study. A comparative analysis of Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris and London, each of which was dominant sometime between the 15th and 17th centuries, would be illuminating. The 17th-century Dutch Republic also deserve special attention (This enterprise obviously involves some collaboration with the Cities team).
3.3. Surveys and tools
The first large surveys measuring population and territory were produced for religious, fiscal and military purposes as part of the process of state building in early modern Europe. These surveys had an enormous cultural impact, because they were responsible for the emergence of comparative ideas concerning the distribution of the population, spatial configurations, and state capacities. Language and cartography emerged as basic tools of information and communication, responsible for creating such new forms of printed books as dictionaries and atlases. How to facilitate (or control) the access to knowledge became a major question during the 16th and l7th centuries by those responsible for the classification of sciences and the systematic organization of knowledge. This section will draw on such disciplines as the history of science, the history of the book, cartography, and linguistics.
- It will investigate censuses and other kinds of social survey, such as Episcopal visitations. In studying these documents and the procedures which shaped them, the group will explore the interaction between local knowledge on the periphery and standardized questions from the centre, and also the exchange of techniques, such as the questionnaire, between religious and secular authorities (this last point should involve some collaboration with the first team, on Religion). The earliest secular surveys came primarily from southern Europe, including Renaissance Florence (the 1427 catasto), Rome and Venice ; the earliest national survey came from Portugal (the 1527 numeramento), and the most ambitious from Philip IIs Spain (the Relaciones topograficas).
- It will also analyze early reference works, linked to changes in reading habits (more browsing, less intensive study), such as chronologies, atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias. Some early forms of gathering information also became early examples of the commercialization of information (e.g., publications with subscription and shares) and produced new encounters between the knowledge of the learned and alternative knowledge (e.g., crafts or non-European traditions).
- Images of the non-European world and images of different European people both emerged in this period, a time of new publications systematically gathering different kinds of information (reports, engravings, maps, itineraries, travel literature). These topics deserve special attention, because through them a certain image of Europe emerged through diversification and confrontation with other cultures and civilizations.
This team is planning four colloquia :
- Structures (above, 3.1.).
- Frontiers of orality and literacy and forms of clandestine communication (3.2. a. and c.).
- Communication and the formation of the European Republic of letters (3.2. b. and d.)
- Surveys and tools (3.3.).
