This special issue focuses on Italian and German historiographies and aims to contribute to establishing a theoretical framework for a history of early modern communication. The introduction by Daniel Bellingradt and Massimo Rospocher addresses why focusing on past communication allows the historian to access and investigate social behaviors and political formations, but also opens horizons to individual and collective patterns of observing and contributing to the media system. In general, the special issue argues for an understanding of “communication” to mean human activities that produce media and likely exert social impact, as the editors state in their introduction. The contributions to this special issue conceive communication history from an interactionist perspective: each traceable past medium is understood as a result of a certain human communicative practice, intended to have a social effect, and interpreted as a media-producing act of communication. The theory model explained in the introduction is followed by case studies around the topic.

[ISBN: 978-88-15-28107-4]