The Talk of the Town

Reviews / Votes

Internet social-media algorithms deluge today's users with unreliable and sometimes contradictory information. This small but dense book offers some unusual perspectives about similarly unreliable and contradictory oral information five centuries ago in the small, prosperous, and autonomous Swiss city of St. Gallen, home of one of Latin Christendom's most famous abbeys. * William Monter, Northwestern University, Journal of Interdisciplinary History * [F]or Roth, Ruetiner's notebooks present a unique opportunity to reconstruct an oral world, and to improve our understanding of the way verbal communication and information worked in a century thought of as an age of print. * John Gallagher, London Review of Books * [The book] takes what older historians considered worthless slag and gives it value, the Commentationes of Johannes Ruetiner allowing us to look at a level rarely accessible to historians interested in this era. * Laurentiu Radvan, History: Reviews of New Books * If you are not looking for a traditional town history, but for a competent guide through an early modern small-town microcosm of gossip - and one which draws attention to the lives and communicative agency of people beyond regiment, guild and humanist circles - with Carla Roth you are in excellent hands. * Isabelle Schuerch, H-Soz-Kult * This is a superbly written, deeply researched book that will be essential reading for urban historians, scholars of early modern information history and print and of the Reformation. * Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Urban History * Combining a microhistorical approach with extensivearchival research, The Talk of the Town by Carla Roth is a brilliant example of how a social history of early modern communication and information should be written. * Massimo Rospocher, American Historical Review *