Dover, Paul M. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe

Paul M. Dover closes The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe by reflecting on "the informational smorgasbord" that constitutes our own media moment (267).It is a fun and fitting description of the mingled textual, visual, and audio information flows of the modern age, and an apt descriptor too for Dover's authoritative and illuminating survey of the proliferation of paper, documentation, and bureaucracy in the Western European Renaissance.This engagingly written synthesis is packed with telling examples, and deftly marshals much of the overflowing information available about the overflow of information in early modern Europe.The book is conspicuously well-researched, and its footnotes point readers to a banquet of scholarship across five languages.Dover argues that gigabytes have replaced the "slips and sheets and piles of paper" (282) that passed across early modern desks, accrued in filing systems, and attempted to index both themselves and each other.Yet his book forms part of a highly current critical and historiographical move to usher in a new "age of paper" that is attentive to the materials of writing and printing and locates the "information revolution" of the early modern period as much in paper as in the technology of the printing press.Dover attends to both writing and print, and neatly demonstrates how the two media informed one another.His embrace of a papery paradigm allows the book to move smoothly between late medieval and early modern examples, and to draw out continuities and histories that have been occluded by accounts of the "printing revolution, " though Dover remains committed to the idea that various intellectual and technical revolutions did occur and marked a decisive break with medieval Europe.Introducing the volume, Dover lays out how writing became an everyday activity for "an unprecedentedly broad segment of the population" (19), charts the birth and rapid maturation of "paperwork, " and describes the period's copious compilatory energy.Chapter 2 briefly describes the history of European papermaking, as well as contemporaries' enthusiasm for paper as a convenient and adaptable material.Dover's third chapter turns to the merchants and financiers who generated sometimes astonishing quantities of paper to transact and record business, and segues neatly into chapter 4, which concerns "the paper

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