Structuring Information: Printed Tables as Organizing Tools in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

In this dissertation, I study the organization of information in an era long before Wikipedia and digital spreadsheets. More specifically, I investigate the methods by which qualitative and quantitative tables were printed and used in Europe between 1450 and 1700. I use editions produced across the European continent during this period, although the bulk of my sources come from Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy. My detailed analysis of visual forms and technical processes related to printed tables provides a new perspective on the intellectual and cultural priorities of the early modern period. Printed tables will not explain the Protestant Reformation or the rise of absolutism, but they do stand witness to the creativity of authors and printers seeking to effectively communicate information as simple as basic multiplication and as complicated as world history. My research grows from a burgeoning discourse on diagrams at the intersection of book history, art history, and history of science. Accordingly, by comparing editions in astronomy and finance as well as linguistics and surveying (to name a few), my project builds on scholarship that has typically distinguished between, rather than synthesized, various genres. The introduction establishes the place occupied by tables within the rich diagrammatic landscape of early modern printing. In the first chapter, I use the calendar as a highly recognizable form of table to see how we can make sense of ubiquity and continuity when it is usually easier for the historian to find unique examples of change over time. The second chapter, on historical tables, demonstrates how and why this diagrammatic tradition survived when a parallel prose tradition of history writing was available and popular during the same period. The third chapter is about long series of quantitative tables, and in it, I investigate how these large collections of information were usable at all by printers and readers alike. The fourth chapter focuses on “unstable tabular forms,” including errors and upside-down presentation, to test the physical and conceptual limits of the table. Finally, the epilogue considers how tabular-adjacent printing, especially accounting ledgers, can inform our understanding of the construction and use of tables proper.