Book Launch ~ Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe, by Rachel Midura

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

Postal Intelligence connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. 

In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and offered new control over the public sphere.

Rachel Midura focuses on the Tassis family, members of which served as official postmasters to the dukes of Milan, the pope, Spanish kings, and Holy Roman emperors.

Using administrative records and family correspondence, she follows the Tassis family, their agents, and their rivals as their influence expanded from northern Italy across Europe. 

Postal Intelligence shows how postmasters and postmistresses were key players in early modern diplomacy, commerce, and journalism, whose ultimate success depended on both administrative ingenuity and strategic ambiguity.

"Rachel Midura provides an excellent and substantial intervention on the role of communications in state formation in early modern history and beyond, using an impressive range of archival sources. Postal Intelligence addresses important questions concerning public and private, the communications revolution, and the intersection of family and state affairs." ~ Catherine Fletcher, author of The Roads to Rome

# # #

About the Author

Rachel Midura is an Assistant Professor of Digital and Early Modern European History at Virginia Tech. With a PhD from  Stanford University, she was a senior graduate fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Her research approached the seventeenth century as an information age created by the printing press and the European postal network. Find out more from Rachel's website https://rachelmidura.com/ and find her on Bluesky @rmidura.bsky.social