Book Reviews

Paul M. Dover. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2021. 342p. Paperback, $29.99 (ISBN: 978-1316602034). 

Millions of documents and digital objects are searchable in online discovery 
tools and databases. It is no wonder that a common concern of research-
ers today—whether first-year undergraduates or seasoned professors—is 
information overload. Paul M. Dover, however, suggests that struggles 
searching for and keeping track of information are nothing new. In The 
Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Dover argues that early 
modern Europeans placed greater emphasis on information management 
in the face of increasing amounts of data, which were piling up in mounds 
of paper in both bureaucratic and personal settings. Instead of viewing the 
post-Gutenberg period as an “age of print,” Dover says that we should see 
it as an “age of paper” (5). He questions the binary between manuscript and 

print cultures and contends that paper was the driving motor of a new information revolution.
Dover divides his study into eight chapters. The first two are a reflection on paper as a 

material object and its informational functions. Paper—originally made from rags—was far 
cheaper than the traditional mediums of parchment and vellum. As paper mills expanded 
from the 1230s onward, paper became more widely available and thus transformed Europe 
into “a culture of paper” (40). Europeans, as a result, were not as concerned with writing things 
down, which placed them in a predicament that Dover calls one of the “paradoxes of paper” 
(39). They had greater liberty to record a wealth of information for everyday transactions and 
for future generations, but as they exercised their newfound freedom, they faced the daunting 
tasks of storage, sorting, and searching.

Chapters 3 and 4 look at the role paper played in the rise of capitalism and the expan-
sion of the early modern state. Merchants and monarchs generated paper trails of letters and 
other documents in their everyday affairs, making writing both a commercial and political 
activity. As the biggest consumers of paper, businesses and governments became information 
managers and, subsequently, produced paper tools like notebooks, registers, inventories, and 
indexes to administer their expanding archives. Dover claims that paper technologies created 
“virtual courts” and communities across Europe and around the world. Indeed, without paper 
European companies and empires would not have been able to maintain the same levels of 
communication and control across such vast distances.

The fifth chapter is yet another corrective to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s printing revolution. 
Manuscript book production had already been increasing in the late medieval period thanks to 
the availability of paper, and print should not be conflated with books. Dover recognizes that 
there was a “quantitative revolution” (152) given the major increase in the number and variety 
of books post-Gutenberg, but he provides a crucial reminder that printers produced a wide 
range of loose sheets for a diversity of purposes, indulgences being one important example. 
Print also led to more manuscripts as early modern scholars jotted down notes, copied printed 

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texts, and still purchased manuscript “publications.” Dover rightly describes the early modern 
period as a “new age of manuscript” instead of simply as an “age of print” (181).

Chapters 6 and 7 look at how increasing levels of paper contributed to changing views 
of the natural world and of the self. Naturalists’ combination of observation, description, and 
reading generated a range of note-taking techniques—loose-leaf manuscript reading notes, 
paper notebooks, and commonplace books—designed to augment the memory. Men and 
women across various social classes and professions exchanged letters and began to produce 
what Jacques Presser has called ego-documents, things like diaries, travel narratives, spiritual 
reflections, and family books. In scientific and domestic spheres, then, Europeans had a “pre-
servative instinct” (242) that transformed them into managers of information. For this reason, 
Dover favours an information revolution over a scientific one and sees increasing levels of 
correspondence as an epistolary revolution.

No book can possibly cover everything about paper in early modern Europe, but Dover 
glosses over two important areas worth highlighting. Throughout his book, writing and 
managing information is primarily an urban affair. Beyond one brief reference to the Tus-
can peasant Benedetto (243), most Europeans, who were illiterate and would not have had 
mounds of papers in their homes, are largely absent from his discussion. Dover understands 
the complementary relationship between textuality and orality and notes how notaries con-
nected the illiterate to written culture, but he fails to explain in detail the roles peasants (who 
are absent from the index) participated in the information revolution and how they were 
influenced by it.

Dover also fails to adequately address the relationship between information manage-
ment and empire building. He draws on a few examples from the Spanish empire, but he 
overlooks what I would call—drawing on the work of Walter Mignolo—the “darker side” of 
paper. European forms of paper expanded as European empires fanned across the globe and 
destroyed alternative forms of record keeping among various Indigenous communities. In 
their place, European missionaries, churchmen, and colonial officials jotted down notes and 
published a wide range of observations about local cultures that in several cases were only 
available in Europe.

The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe is a helpful synthesis of many of the 
changes that took place in the information landscape of early modern Europe. Scholars of the 
early modern period, information science, and printing will need to read this book. Under-
graduate and graduate students will appreciate Dover’s connections between the past and 
the present as digital technologies have made “archivists and information mangers out of us 
all” (283). — Jason Dyck, University of Western Ontario

Community College Library: Reference and Instruction. Janet Pinkley and Kaela Casey, eds. 
Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library 
Association, 2022. 317 p. Softcover, $98.00. ($88.20 ALA members) (ISBN: 978-0-8389-3768-6).

The Community College Library: Reference and Instruction is the next in a series of collected works 
aimed at increasing research and scholarly writing specific to community college libraries. 
Along with another recently released collection on assessment, CCL: Reference and Instruction 
highlights a wide range of teaching strategies, outreach efforts, critical looks at practice in 
the community college, and partnership opportunities. Each of the twenty-four chapters is 
relatively short and infused with both informal anecdotes and ties to the greater body of in-