"Burne this when yow have red it": Secret Intelligence, Information Wars, and Political Satire in William Trumbull the Elder's Papers.

William Trumbull the Elder was an efficient English diplomatic agent in the Netherlands, and his papers illustrate the intersection of diplomacy, espionage, and public controversies in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. This article examines a series of samples from his collection of printed pamphlets and the ways in which they relate to his manuscript archive. It therefore lays a path toward further research into Trumbull's rich collections, which represent a singular hybrid lying at the intersection of manuscript and print, on the one hand, early modern journalism, prose fiction, and political satire, on the other. It focuses on a publishing genre that repurposed private manuscript documents into ostentatiously public political propaganda in print, frequently distributed in translation and in multilingual formats for an international readership. Trumbull's documents, and the practices that they inform, are all part of the long history of information and knowledge production. As such, they constitute excellent case studies for the panoply of documentary genres used in the competition for political legitimacy conducted in the public arena, many of which resorted to a series of strategies that can be described as the manufacture of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]