Berkeley Legal History Workshop Welcomes Rachel Midura

Rachel Midura is a digital historian of early modern Europe specializing in the history of information. She researches the history of intelligence, travel, and statecraft in the information age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her first book, Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025) 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. She is also the lead project investigator for Early Modern Digital Itineraries, which transforms early printed itinerary books to support new, data-driven approaches to the history of travel. She has recently published articles on Elizabethan espionage and transalpine surveillance, and is at work on a book about the history of conspiracy, assassination, and treason.

Abstract

Foreign ambassadors and residents formed intelligence networks in seventeenth-century Venice. Between 1610 and 1613, Venetian inquisitors launched an aggressive campaign to prune these networks and force clearer limits on ambassadorial immunities. Battles took place street by street as spies, secret arrests, and public confrontations with Venetian police enacted foreign relations on an urban stage. This talk and book chapter will explore how this pivotal crisis contributed to a crucial and lasting consensus: the jurisdictional borderland began at the embassy’s threshold.

To receive a copy of the paper, please email egonzalez@law.berkeley.edu