Early modern Europe witnessed an eruption of news. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the burgeoning business of print, the professionalization of postal networks, confessional conflict, and the process of state-building all worked together to radically improve the availability of political information in a wide range of genres, ranging from handwritten newsletters to elaborate prints depicting recent sieges and battles. As the universe of news rapidly expanded and evolved, ever more people gained access to ever more information from an ever wider geographical range. It was a development that deeply affected various spheres of life. Elites engaged in high politics, book traders, merchants, as well as ordinary citizens were confronted with a phenomenon that affected their business, their daily lives, and their view of the world.This special issue of Media History aspires to advance a new perspective on the early modern communication revolution by treating news as a specific kind of information-by its nature continuous, unreliable, and diffuse-which needed to be managed. The news boom of the early modern period challenged European authorities, producers, and readers to devise their own strategies to create cohesion in the fragmented supply of (mis)information. How did authorities respond to the diversity of news? Which strategies of information management did individual and institutional readers employ to make sense of the rapid succession of events in distant places? How and why was news collected? And how was news incorporated into history writing and political narratives, and ultimately into collective memories? 1 The overload of information, as Ann Blair has demonstrated to great acclaim a few years ago, presented early modern Europeans with a problem that, if not entirely new, had certainly been more limited before the invention of the printing press. Multiple factors contributed to the rise of an early modern information age: the costs of production were reduced by the displacement of parchment by paper, literacy rates gradually improved (particularly in towns that simultaneously developed into information hubs), and cultural attitudes of readers changed. The impact of print, and the public distress the mass production of information could cause, was particularly acute for genres that were produced in large numbers for low prices.2 Blair mentions indulgences as the most poignant example, but for our purposes the same characteristics could easily be applied to news sheets. Since the appearance of Too Much to Know, the profusion of news in its many oral and written forms during the early modern period has received a lot of scholarly attention. Andrew Pettegree in particular, in two recent books, has advocated an interpretation of early modern news culture as a segment of the book market. In The Invention of News, he systematically traces the emergence of printed newspapers and handwritten periodical Media History, 2016 Vol. 22,[261][262][263][264][265][266] http://dx
In 1649, Charles I was executed before Whitehall Palace in London. This event had a major impact not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent, where British exiles, diplomats and agents waged propaganda battles to conquer the minds of foreign audiences. In the Dutch Republic above all their efforts had a significant impact on public opinion, and succeeded in triggering violent debate. This is the first book-length study devoted to the continental backlash of the English Civil Wars. Interdisciplinary in scope and drawing on a wide range of sources, from pamphlets to paintings, Helmer Helmers shows how the royalist cause managed to triumph in one of the most unlikely places in early modern Europe. In doing so, Helmers transforms our understanding of both British and Dutch political culture, and provides new contexts for major literary works by Milton, Marvell, Huygens, and many others.
View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles the term. Indeed soft diplomacy had never been conducted on such a scale, and with such sophistication as during the Cold War. 1 And yet there is an early modern pre
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