News in Early Modern Europe – Currents and Connections, edited by Simon Davies and Puck Fletcher, presents significant new research on the production and dissemination of news in early modern Europe. Interdisciplinary in focus, and wide in geographical and chronological scope, the collection includes theoretical enquiries about the nature of news alongside deep archival case studies.
Chapters in the volume cover such issues as: the functioning of international networks of news dissemination; the blurred boundaries between news reporting and other forms of writing, including entertainment, propaganda, and satire; the ways in which issues in social history, such as neighbourhood and gender, can be explored via study of news; and the cross-pollination of news and literature, in drama, ballads, and plague writing.
Contributors include: Viviana Comensoli, Virginia Dillon, Andrew Hadfield, John M. Hunt, Anna Kalinowska, Joop W. Koopmans, Lena Liapi, Nick Moon, Adam Morton, Lena Steveker, Catherine Tremain, Emma Whipday.
Simon F. Davies, PhD (2013), University of Sussex, works on book history and the literature of witchcraft. He has published on witchcraft and the history of reading, and is currently working on an edition of an unpublished seventeenth-century witchcraft treatise.
Puck Fletcher is an AHRC funded DPhil candidate in English at the University of Sussex. They have published articles on John Milton and Isaac Newton, and were the executive editor of the website Darkness Visible (Christ’s College, Cambridge, 2008).
“an important contribution to our understanding of the early modern news world.”
Arthur der Weduwen, University of St Andrews. In: Quaerendo, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2018), pp. 80-82.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction
Simon F. Davies and Puck Fletcher
1. The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami in Dutch News Sources: The Functioning of Early Modern News Dissemination
Joop W. Koopmans
2. “Wee have tidings out of Polonia”: English Corantos, News Networks, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Anna Kalinowska
3. Transylvania in German Newspapers: Systems of Reporting and the News Stories of György II Rákóczi, 1657-58
Virginia Dillon
4. News of the Sussex Dragon
Andrew Hadfield
5. “Loyal Hind”, “The Prince of Thieves”: Crime Pamphlets and Royalist Propaganda in the 1650s
Lena Liapi
6. Intensive Ephemera: The Catholick Gamesters and the Visual Culture of News in Restoration London
Adam Morton
7. Rumour, Newsletters, and the Pope’s Death in Early Modern Rome
John M. Hunt
8. “A True Reporte”: News and the Neighbourhood in Early Modern Domestic Murder Texts
Emma Whipday
9. Life After Death: Gender, Idealized Virtues, and the Obituary in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers
Catherine Tremain
10. “This straunge newes”: Plague Writing, Print Culture, and the Invention of News in Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful yeare (1603)
Viviana Comensoli
11. English News Plays of the Early 1620s: Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess and Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News
Lena Steveker
12. “This is Attested truth”: The Rhetoric of Truthfulness in Early Modern Broadside Ballads
Nick Moon
Bibliography of secondary works
Index
Postgraduate and undergraduate students, researchers, and academic libraries, from the fields of history and literature, with interests in early modern Europe, news, book history, literary forms, social history, and politics.