Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

The Talk of the Town : Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland, PDF eBook

The Talk of the Town : Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland PDF

Part of the The Past and Present Book Series series

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

The Talk of the Town explores everyday communication in a sixteenth-century small town and the role it played in the circulation of information across and within early modern communities.

It does so through the lens of the St Gall linen trader Johannes R?tiner (1501-1556/7) and his notebooks, the Commentationes; a little-known source which offers unusual insights into an oral world normally hidden from view.

A close reading of R?tiner's notes on hundreds of conversations reveals what the inhabitants of a sixteenth-century town talked about, through which channels such information reached them, and how it was then processed, shared, criticized, contradicted, and employed as a means to forge and strengthen social bonds.

By bringing together the histories of sociability and information, reconstructing Ru?tiner's network of informants and probing a broad variety of exchanges-jokes, gossip, news, and tales of the past-Carla Roth rethinks both what constituted valuable information in the sixteenth century and who was able to provide it, and argues that the circulation of information remained inseparably linked to the social dynamics of face-to-face exchanges long into the age of print.

Information

Other Formats

Information