More Information: https://rsa.confex.com/rsa/21virtual/meetingapp.cgi/Session/4324

This roundtable will consider the appeal of using “information” as an organizing concept for historical study (as a complement to the history of ideas or of knowledge) and will focus especially on the movements of information across places, generations, and social and intellectual contexts in the early modern period. The chair and participants have all contributed to a forthcoming volume entitled Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press, 2021) and will reflect on that experience. They variously focus on the people, materials, institutions, and practices involved in the circulation of information, among them spies and diplomats, bells, postal systems, education, forgery and plagiarism, medical casebooks, and much more. Time-place contextual considerations will also be discussed, from Renaissance Italy and Reformation Zurich to early modern England and colonial America.

Session Monitors

• Ann M. Blair Harvard University
• Anthony Grafton Princeton University

Participants

• Alexander Fisher University of British Columbia
• Anja-Silvia Goeing Harvard University
• Earle A. Havens Johns Hopkins University
• Lauren Kassell Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
• David Henkin University of California Berkeley
• Paul M. Dover Kennesaw State University