Suggested preparatory reading:
Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing like a statesman’, Past and Present 233 (2014), 77-127;
Arnold Hunt, ‘The early modern secretary and the early modern archive’, in (eds), Archives and Information in the Early Modern World, Kate Peters, Alexandra Walsham and Liesbeth Corens (Oxford, 2018), 105-30; Patrick Collinson, ’Servants and citizens: Robert Beale and other Elizabethans,’ Historical Research, 79 (2009), 488-511; Nicholas Popper, ‘An information state for Elizabethan England’, Journal of Modern History, 90 (2018), 503-535