Mirror of Information in Early Modern England

James Dougal Fleming is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He studies the history and theory of interpretation and understanding. In 2012, he co-founded the international conference series Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World. This is his third book.

• Introduction.- Mercurial messages: What is information?.- Unreal characters: Orality and technology in seventeenth-century England.- Through a glass, literally: From shorthand to Wilkins’s Essay.- The next big thing: How the real character works.- The Circularity: Or, how to end the world.

“Fleming’s is an engaging … book that provides an important addition to existing scholarship on the oddly early modern preoccupation with the need for a universal language.” (Allison B. Kavey, Metascience, September 5, 2019)