This volume follows the beginnings and development of seventeenth-century English periodical print news and sees how contemporary news writers shaped their news discourse over the decades. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the volume analyses the different strategies employed by news writers of the day as they determined how best to present and write up both foreign and domestic events for a news-obsessed English readership. In his examination of the language used in corantos, newsbooks and gazettes—the first forms of periodical news in the English press—Nicholas Brownlees provides innovative analyses regarding a rich variety of topics including: the role of translation in early periodical news; the language of hard news in corantos and news pamphlets; forms and styles of epistolary news; fluctuating editorial strategies used to address and involve the reader; text structure and prototypical headlines; English news discourse within a wider European news context; the language of propaganda in the English Civil War; periodicity and the reporting of the Tuscan crisis in 1653; the language of ‘Advertisements’ in The London Gazette; the changing fortunes and semantics of News, Intelligence and Advice. In its focus on how news writers worked and experimented with seventeenth-century English language structures and discourse conventions to forge a style of news rhetoric that could inform, persuade and even entertain, this volume is essential reading for all historians, news analysts and historical linguists working in the early modern period.

Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England investigates how and why letters were printed in the interrelated spheres of political contestation, religious controversy, and news culture—those published as pamphlets, as broadsides, and in newsbooks in the interests of ideological disputes and as political and religious propaganda. The epistolary texts examined in this book, be they fictional, satirical, collected, or authentic, were written for, or framed to have, a specific persuasive purpose, typically an ideological or propagandistic one. This volume offers a unique exploration into the crucial interface of manuscript culture and print culture where tremendous transformations occur, when, for instance, at its most basic level, a handwritten letter composed by a single individual and meant for another individual alone comes, either intentionally or not, into the purview of hundreds or even thousands of people. This essential context, a solitary exchange transmuted via print into an interaction consumed by many, serves to highlight the manner in which letters were exploited as propaganda and operated as vehicles of cultural narrative.

The exchange of news belongs to the fabric of functional elites and affects institutionalisation processes in seventeenth century. The news market was part of the elite’s social economy. Investment in news resulted in participation and privilege.

Examining new research, this excellent volume presents a series of case-studies exemplifying the new newspaper history. Using cross-cultural comparisons, Joad Raymond establishes an agenda for answering crucial questions central to the future histories of the political and literary culture of early-modern Britain: * What is the relationship between the circulation of news in Britain and communication networks elsewhere in Europe? * Was the British development of the media unique? * What are the specific rhetorical properties of news-communication in seventeeth-century Britain? * What was the relationship between commerce and politics? * How do local exchanges of news relate to national practices and institutions? Previously published as a special issue of the journal Media History, this book is compulsory reading for researchers and students of European history and media studies alike.

Travelling Chronicles presents fourteen episodes in the history of news, written by some of the leading scholars in the rapidly developing fields of news and newspaper studies. Ranging across eastern and western Europe and beyond, the chapters look back to the early modern period and into the eighteenth century to consider how the news of the past was gathered and spread, how news outlets gained respect and influence, how news functioned as a business, and also how the historiography of news can be conducted with the resources available to scholars today. Travelling Chronicles offers a timely analysis of early news, at a moment when historical newspaper archives are being widely digitalised and as the truth value of news in our own time undergoes intense scrutiny.

Winner of the 2019 Menno Hertzberger Encouragement Prize for Book History and Bibliography In Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century Arthur der Weduwen presents the first comprehensive account of the early newspaper in the Low Countries. Composed of two volumes, this survey provides detailed introductions and bibliographical descriptions of 49 newspapers, surviving in over 16,000 issues in 84 archives and libraries. This work presents a crucial overview of the first fledgling century of newspaper publishing and reading in one of the most advanced political cultures of early modern Europe. Seventy years after Folke Dahl’s Dutch Corantos first documented early Dutch newspapers, Der Weduwen offers a brand-new approach to the bibliography of the early modern periodical press. This includes, amongst others, a description of places of correspondence listed in each surviving newspaper. The bibliography is accompanied by an extensive introduction of the Dutch and Flemish press in the seventeenth century. What emerges is a picture of a highly competitive and dynamic market for news, in which innovative publishers constantly adapt to the changing tastes of customers and pressures from authorities at home and abroad.