Pure and Perfect: Reading Knowledge, Information, and Status in Early Modern England Through Manorial Accounting of the Landed Elites

This case study explores technological, intellectual, and social change by looking at the development of information culture in early modern Europe. I do this by analyzing a set of manorial accounting books spanning the years 1577–1801. I first document the progression and consolidation of information systems developed during this time. I then highlight their relationship to normative values expounded in didactic instructional treatises. Lastly, I consider the material, intellectual, and cultural relationship between information and status. Understanding this earlier encounter with information systems and expert texts contributes a textured understanding of a transition to new forms of information technologies familiar to our own in the twenty-first century and their normative character.