Andreea Badea, “On Censors and Booksellers: Curial Elites and the Regulation of Roman Book Trade in the Seventeenth Century”, in: Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World (Knowledge Societies in History 5), edited by Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, London: Routledge, 2022, pp. 193−210.

In the early modern period, the scale, intensity, and reach of exchange exploded. This contribution is part of the edited volume Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World that develops develops a historicised understanding of knowledge transfer. By looking at the preconditions of knowledge transfer, the volume shifts the focus from the objects circulating to the interactions by which they circulate and the way actors cement their relations. The novelty of this approach shows how rules and regulations were enablers of knowledge circulation, rather than impediments. The chapters identify changing patterns of knowledge transfer in cases such as sixteenth-century Venice, the Spanish Empire in the Americas, continental Habsburg, early seventeenth-century Dutch at sea, and the Ofces of the Catholic Church. Through the perspective of ‘regulating’, this volume advances the historiography of knowledge circulation by forging a new combination of histories of circulation and of institutions.