AHA Session 252
Renaissance Society of America 3
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Studio 4 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Madeline McMahon, University of Texas at Austin
Session Abstract
In recent decades, new scholarly approaches have coalesced under such labels as the “history of information,” the “history of knowledge-making,” and the like, replacing or at least revising older approaches grounded in intellectual history or the history of ideas. Yet these enterprises need not restrict themselves to technical or recherché domains. Rather, they offer scholars new methods and categories with which to interrogate old questions—particularly topics that have long defined the study of early modern Europe and its relationship to the contemporary world. As the period designation implies, early modern Europe was long imagined as a font of origin stories, furnishing scholars with the roots of modern religious movements, modern statecraft, and modern historiography—to name but a few of the themes explored in this panel’s papers. But treating these stories as episodes in the history of information can help complicate such tidy narratives and the teleologies they all too often assume. Rather than simply interrogating the propositional content of what early modern historians, politicians, and theologians argued, new approaches grounded in the history of information and knowledge-making offer a finer lens with which to consider how early modern actors organized, classified, and promoted the knowledge they deemed valuable—knowledge whose legacies we still grapple with in the twenty-first century. We can study how some bits of knowledge and information traveled, whereas others were revised, distorted, or even stalled.
This panel will consider these themes through three case studies, in religion, politics, and historiography. The contents of these case studies will range in time and space from the fourteenth-century Italian humanist Petrarch to the eighteenth-century New England clergyman Cotton Mather. They will explore everything from English Parliamentary records and Latin universal history textbooks to Puritan scholarship in colonial America. Taken together, these papers will examine the often circuitous “information itineraries” that texts and ideas followed, whether from a medieval roll to early modern print, or from a professor’s textbook to their students’ lecture notes. We will follow these itineraries from Rome to London to Halle, across the Atlantic to Boston, and from early modernity to today. As each paper contends, studying the fortunes of information, long before our current “Information Age,” offers new solutions to old problems, in early modern studies and beyond.
