Information Itineraries and the History of Knowledge: An Early Modern Case Study

My talk traces the movements of a packet of information that at one stop on its voyage become William Prynne’s 1657 AnExact Abridgment of Records in the Tower of London. By examining the possibilities of use and interpretation afforded by this information in its various formats, I hope to provide a model for a mode of history of knowledge that one might call “information itineraries.”

What would become Prynne’s text originated in thousands of Parliamentary actions recorded as formal business on parchment rolls between 1312 and 1485. At some point during the reign of Elizabeth I, Keeper of the Tower Records William Bowyer took extensive notes on these rolls. Decades after his death, his son and successor lent the codex containing them to the antiquary Robert Cotton, who entered his own comments in its margins. Prynne inherited this manuscript through uncertain channels and had it printed by William and John Leake; one copy came to the statesmen Denzil Holles, who returned with it to the Tower in the mid 1670s to collate it with the source texts during a constitutional crisis.

At each stop of the itinerary, the individuals transmitting the information both adopted and adapted the practices of their predecessors to create their bundles. Bowyer, for example, abridged the rolls’ texts but tried to demarcate when text came from distinct rolls in his mis-en-page; Prynne reproduced Bowyer’s text precisely but to maximize efficiency, it was printed without Bowyer’s careful spacing and arrangement. Such decisions gave new meanings to the information discernible only by comparing them to previous iterations. Tracing such itineraries, I suggest, can thus effectively illuminate the material, social, and political dimensions of knowledge production across multiple spaces and temporalities.