For Rütiner and those around him, a story that could be traced back through a chain of identifiable and reliable people was much more believable, even if it recounted events happening far away, than a printed pamphlet or book that couldn’t be subjected to the same kind of ‘source criticism’.

With his carefully kept Commentationes, Rütiner was building a conversational arsenal – a treasury of stories, jokes and privileged information that would show him to be in the know.

Roth calls this ‘communicative capital’: a storehouse of material to be deployed in conversation to build status, reputation and wealth.

‘The greatest pleasure,’ Rütiner wrote, ‘is to associate and converse with learned men.’

Rütiner’s manuscripts, known as the Commentationes – a term meaning ‘studies’ or ‘treatise’ – were long dismissed by historians as a gossipy record that had none of the gravitas of the more publicly oriented chronicles of urban life kept by his more scholarly and respected peers.