intelligencing

English

Etymology

intelligence +‎ -ing

Adjective

intelligencing (not comparable)

1. (obsolete) Giving information; talebearing.
   • 1641 May, John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Cavvses that hitherto have Hindred it; republished as Will Taliaferro Hale, editor, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England (Yale Studies in English; LIV), New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1916, →OCLC:

     that sad intelligencing tyrant

   • c. 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Winters Tale”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iii]:

     Hence with her, out o' door: A most intelligencing bawd!

Noun

intelligencing (countable and uncountable, plural intelligencings)

1. The act of trading in information; serving as a go-between, diplomat, organizer, or spy.
   • 2010, R. Adams, ‎ R. Cox, Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, page 78:

     Intelligencing for personal profit, albeit through the service of the crown, could call the agent's allegiance into question.

   • 2012, Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution:

     Playing off of Allen's account of intelligencing, I propose that another name for the kind of community that Marlowe stages is false brotherhood, especially since Barabas, Abigail, Ithamore, Bella Mira, and Pilia-Borza all end up engaging in the kinds of actions that Allen associates with intelligencing.

   • 2018, Angus Bill Angus, Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre:

     Unfortunately for Vindice, the object of his pandering is to be his own sister, Castiza (1.2.128), but the very fact that he is willing to play this game suggests a patent connection between morally dubious intelligencing and the business of acting.

   • 2019, Howard Hotson, ‎ Thomas Wallnig, Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age, page 412:

     For that reason Hartlib presents a faxcinating site of experiment: he straddles the international, intellectual 'intelligencing' characteristic of the republic of letters, and the more pragmatic intelligence gathering central to the formation of the English state. A large body of correspondence representative of this kind of political intelligencing within the Commonwealth and Protectorate are readily available within the English seventeenth-century StatePapers.

   • 2012, Carol Pal, Republic of Women:

     Considering intelligencing as a coherent group of practics furthering the advancement of learning, I will be suggesting that Ranelagh was much more than just another correspondent.

   • 2021, Elizabeth R. Williamson, Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture:

     The crux is that 'intelligencing' does not need to include clandestine activities: intelligence in the early modern period is more about information that is in some way privileged, or special insight, rather than discrete items of secret knowledge.

2. The exercise of intelligence; The manifestation of sentience or intellect.
   • 1884 April, J.B. de Concilio, “The Plurality of Worlds”, in The American Catholic Quarterly Review, volume 9, page 204:

     As a necessary consequence of this pure spirituality and absolute independence of the angelic nature of all material aid or instrument for its operation, St. Thomas argues that the intellect of the angel, as regards whatever comes within the range of its natural knowledge, is always in the act of intelligencing, and can never be found in the state of potentiality.

   • 2007, Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, page 154:

     To begin with, I shall address three of the different forms of sentience that can currently be found in the world: animal, human, and thing. Then, I will argue that these forms of intelligencing are beginning to have more in common as a result of the efflorescences of a suite of 'understated' technologies which enable evironments to become both extended and more active.

   • 2017, Chris Philo, Theory and Methods: Critical Essays in Human Geography:

     In this paper, I want to argue that the world consists of a series of 'intelligencings', to use a rather clumsy phrase, intelligencings which vary substantially in their reach and understanding and interaction, and which have geographies we can and should map – 'infovorous' geographies that can and do teach us how to be, and that therefore have an important ethical dimension.