Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox 9
rival territories, for trade, military and dynastic purposes. Despite the
demand for and premium on these materials, Barber reveals that far
from being accurate and even useful tools, many of these maps were
unreliable. In ‘Scholars, Servants, Spies: William Weldon and William
Swerder in England and Abroad’, Jason Powell explores the archival
legacy of two Tudor men-of-business, Weldon and Swerder, focusing
particularly on their time in Paris between 1538 to 1540. Both men had
served in embassies abroad and were well connected with substantial
patronage networks in England. Though neither achieved political or
literary prominence, Powell reveals how their letters from this period
can tell us much about the varied activities and experiences of English
expatriate scholars, servants and spies abroad at the height of the
Henrician Reformation. Stephen Alford, in ‘Some Elizabethan Spies
in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham’, offers an interior view of
the day-to-day workings of the intelligence secretariat headed by Sir
Francis Walsingham. His essay reveals the modus operandi and the motives
of the figures involved in espionage during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Central though Walsingham’s office was to the practice of spying,
Alford demon strates how espionage permeated every level of court and
society, and moreover reveals the intrinsic links between patronage
and the gathering of information.
In her essay ‘A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation
of Intelligence’ Robyn Adams presents a case-study of the Elizabethan
agent Herle, exploring how his methods of disseminating intelligence
intersect with his strategies for maintaining patronage and credit.
Beginning with an examination of a sequence of letters sent by Herle
from Antwerp in 1582, Adams interrogates the status of agents sent
abroad or permitted to travel without official diplomatic status, and
asks whether it is possible to construct an anatomy of the Elizabethan
intelligence service by looking at the porous membranes inhabited by
informers, spies, agents, ambassadors and intelligencers in this period.
Joanna Craigwood explores the relationship and dialogue between
diplomatic theory and literary representation in her essay ‘Sidney,
Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy’. Exploring the relationship,
both intellectual and personal, between the diplomatic theorist and
civil lawyer Alberico Gentili and the poet-diplomat Sir Philip Sidney,
Craigwood argues that for Gentili and Sidney, theories of diplomatic
representation and theories of language and literature derive from
their shared readings of Plato, Aristotle and Scaliger. For Sidney, as
for Gentili, poetry is analogous to embassy: words are ambassadorial
representatives that faithfully represent the author’s reason. In his essay
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10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
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