Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture

Offering a fresh approach to the study of the figure of the diplomat in the early modern period, this collection of diverse readings of archival texts, objects and contexts contributes a new analysis of the spaces, activities and practices of the Renaissance embassy.

Robyn Adams is Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary, University of London, UK. She has published articles which focus on intelligencers in the sixteenth century and is the editor of the online letter editions, The Letters of William Herle and The Diplomatic Letters of Thomas Bodley. She is also associate editor of Letters of a Stuart Princess: the Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, Vol. II. Her interests include epistolary culture, the circulation of information, and the relationship between news and friendship networks in the early modern period. Rosanna Cox is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent, UK. She works mainly on the politics, literature and thought of the civil war, commonwealth and restoration periods, and is particularly interested in the works of John Milton. She has published chapters and articles on Milton's politics, and on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, and is currently working on her monograph on Milton and citizenship.

Foreword; L.Jardine
Introduction; R.Adams& R.Cox
'Procure as many as you can and send them over': Cartographic Espionage and Cartographic Gifts in International Relations 1460-1760; P.Barber
Scholars, Servants, Spies: William Weldon and William Swerder in England and Abroad; J.Powell
Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham; S.Alford
A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence; R.Adams
Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy; J.Craigwood
Gender, Politics and Diplomacy: Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan England; J.Daybell
Francis Bacon's Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing; A.Stewart
Court Hieroglyphics: The Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson's Masques; H.J.Crawforth
The Ambassador's Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing; M.Netzloff
The Postmistress, The Diplomat, and a Black Chamber?: Alexandrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier and the Power of Postal Control; N.Akkerman
Index