Information and the Government of the Composite Polities of the Renaissance World (c. 1350-1650)

This book examines the role of information as a crucial means for governance and negotiation, through which Renaissance rulers and governments managed the composite polities under their control. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

Autorentext

Alessandro Silvestri is Associate Professor at the Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy. His research focuses on the Mediterranean in the later Middle Ages, with particular attention to Sicily and the Crown of Aragon. His areas of expertise include the history of administration, information management, and taxation.

Inhalt

1. Information and the government of the composite polities of the Renaissance world (c. 1350-1650) 2. Ruling by information, governing by records: the spoken and written grammar of power in post-communal Italy (c. 1350-1520) 3. Archiving the Swiss Tagsatzung in the early modern era: from distributed protocols to confederal archive 4. 'We want to know and be clearly informed': official records, unofficial correspondence and oral communication in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon (Majorca, Sardinia, Sicily) 5. Jem Sultan and Venice's intelligence system: sorting and deploying information in Venice's 'letterocracy' 6. An imperial formation joins a composite polity: the Portuguese Empire and the information system of the Hispanic Monarchy (1580-1640) 7. Manila and their agents in the court: long-distance political communication and imperial configuration in the seventeenth-century Spanish monarchy 8. The composite world of early modern information