Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 Rütiner (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 Rütiner''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.
Trade ReviewInternet social-media algorithms deluge today's users with unreliable and sometimes contradictory information. This small but dense book offers some unusual perspectives about similarly unreliable and contradictory oral information five centuries ago in the small, prosperous, and autonomous Swiss city of St. Gallen, home of one of Latin Christendom's most famous abbeys. * William Monter, Northwestern University, Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
[F]or Roth, Rütiner's notebooks present a unique opportunity to reconstruct an oral world, and to improve our understanding of the way verbal communication and information worked in a century thought of as an age of print. * John Gallagher, London Review of Books *
[The book] takes what older historians considered worthless slag and gives it value, the Commentationes of Johannes Rütiner allowing us to look at a level rarely accessible to historians interested in this era. * Laurentiu Rădvan, History: Reviews of New Books *
If you are not looking for a traditional town history, but for a competent guide through an early modern small-town microcosm of gossip - and one which draws attention to the lives and communicative agency of people beyond regiment, guild and humanist circles - with Carla Roth you are in excellent hands. * Isabelle Schürch, H-Soz-Kult *
This is a superbly written, deeply researched book that will be essential reading for urban historians, scholars of early modern information history and print and of the Reformation. * Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Urban History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Taking note of a 'wondrous time' 2: Informants and networks 3: Obscene humour and sociability 4: Gossip and the value of social knowledge 5: Rumour, news, and trust 6: Tales of the past Conclusion
