About Sub Rosa

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Sub Rosa chronicles cultural responses to surveillance, focusing mainly on the imaginative representations of surveillance that explore its social, political, legal, and moral complexity. Surveillance naturally appears in the development of culture as new exigencies demand it and new technologies permit it. Instead of limiting this blog's scope to conventional ideas of surveillance, the James Bond stuff, I want Sub Rosa to explore issues relevant to contemporary society, such as the impact that emergent technology, like the Internet and Big Data, have had on our evolving notions of what it means to engage in surveillance. I am trying to understand the changes in our time by researching past cultural responses to surveillance. Ours is not the only age to face the simultaneous emergence of new technology and surveillance. Renaissance England witnessed profound technological advancement in the form of the printing press. It was also the age of Shakespeare, of a flowering of culture and the arts—as well as of a savvy government spy apparatus that made use of the latest technology to spy on those it governed. By examining this time and place (in addition to others), Sub Rosa participates in two very different but related conversations: one about the literature and culture of Renaissance England and another about how cultures respond to surveillance—of all varieties. The mode of surveillance that most intrigues me is reading. Yes, reading. My current research shows how reading and surveillance came to overlap in early modern England because of developments in print culture that decentralized reading practices and spread affordable paper across Europe, which resulted in an explosion of handwritten correspondence and created the very infrastructure of early modern surveillance. I thus am deeply involved in the history of reading and the history of the book and hope to bring this knowledge of early modern reading practices to bear on the trends in reading developing today.


In Latin "sub rosa" means under the rose. Roses were symbols of secrecy in Ancient Greece and Rome. Roman triclinia, or dining rooms, often had roses painted on their ceilings to remind those enjoying the flowing libations that whatever was said under the influence of alcohol, and there was plenty of wine to go around at a Roman banquet, should also be said sub rosa, or in confidence: what happens there, stays there. Ancient Roman banquets were a lot like Vegas, except that Vegas doesn't have hotels that offer baked flamingo for dinner (yet) or special latrines for vomiting (as far as I know). Sub rosa held special significance in early modern England, when the Tudors held sway. Their official symbol was the Tudor Rose, which was painted on the ceiling of the room where Henry VIII and his councilors debated matters of state under the Tudor Rose, that all-seeing reminder that loose lips sink ships.