Carmen Espejo-Cala

The Lexicons of Early Modern News

The vocabulary for news spread across Europe with the news itself. This is evident enough in the geographical dispersal of words including gazette, avviso, mercury. However, also like the news itself, as these words were domesticated into regional languages and local news cultures they developed local inflections. Looking closely at the languages of news across Europe reveals continuities and discontinuities in practice, it identifies the movement of conventions and uncovers false friends that are evidence of both common and idiosyncratic practices. One of the first things discovered in the workshops organised by the Leverhulme-Trust funded research network, News Networks in Early Modern Europe 1500–1700, was that we needed to understand more precisely the lexicons we deployed in various tongues in a wider context, and that a polyglot lexicon was a necessary foundation for a transnational understanding of the cosmopolitan cultures of European news. The history of news in early modern Europe has been strongly shaped by—and consequently fashioned into—national narratives, narratives that risk ignoring or downplaying the extent to which news and its circulation were transnational phenomena. It was a starting point of the network and its participants that the tendency to view the historiography of news in national isolation, by separating news products from the variety of forms, names and networks by which they were distributed across Europe, risks simplifying news history into a narrowly developmental account that measures the sophistication and interest of a given news culture principally by the speed with which it brought about the printed daily newspaper. We sought to replace this with an international story, recognising the international character and freedom of movement of news, its fungibility and mobility between diverse political, social, and linguistic contexts. Translation (and thus communities of jobbing translators) was one of the foundations of the movement of news, and it was soon apparent to the network that the polyglot and cosmopolitan character of Europe’s vocabularies of news presented unanticipated challenges. Discussions of forms, networks, and definitions of news in the course of the project’s researches highlighted a number of important questions: how can we be sure, when we use a single word to

European Postal Networks

espanolDurante el siglo XVI, las rutas postales estatales, basadas en una sucesion de caballos montados por un solo ciclista a traves de una serie de etapas organizadas, se desarrollaron en toda Europa y se transformaron progresivamente en servicios publicos. La comunicacion postal era fundamental para las noticias europeas y, aunque no eran en modo alguno la unica base de comunicacion, formaban la columna vertebral esencial de las redes de noticias.1 Tenemos dos suposiciones de trabajo: la primera, que la penetracion de la avvisi en la cultura publica de las primeras (Es decir, mas alla de las comunicaciones oficiales) dependia del desarrollo de servicios postales accesibles. La segunda es que las entregas postales publicas (relativamente) predecibles, que se desarrollaron a partir de las necesidades administrativas del estado y de la cultura manuscrita, incluidas las noticias manuscritas, eran una condicion previa para el desarrollo de una prensa periodistica (relativamente) periodica. Una vez que se establecieron los periodicos, podian recurrir a comunicaciones de otros tipos de conexion de red (comerciantes, iglesias y monasterios, libreros, correos diplomaticos, soldados, viajeros, capitanes de buques, etc.), pero ser ampliamente establecidos en primer lugar Necesitaban puestos publicos fiables, trayendo correspondencia de un numero de centros de redaccion de noticias en otros lugares. En este articulo bosquejamos los diversos sistemas postales que atravesaban Europa, y, crucialmente, como estaban interconectados. EnglishDuring the early sixteenth century state postal routes, based on a sequence of horses ridden by a single rider across a series of organised stages, were developed across Europe and were progressively transformed into public services. Postal communication was fundamental to European news, and though they were by no means the only basis of communication they formed the essential spine to news networks.1 We have two working assumptions: the first, that the penetration of avvisi into the public culture of early-modern Europe (i.e. beyond official communications) depended on the development of accessible postal services. The second is that (relatively) predictable public postal deliveries, which developed out of state administrative needs and manuscript culture, including manuscript news, were a precondition for the development of a (relatively) periodic newspaper press. Once newspapers were established, they could draw in communications from other types of network connection (merchants, churches and monasteries, booksellers, diplomatic couriers, soldiers, travellers, ships’ captains, and so on), but to be widely established in the first place they needed reliable public posts, bringing correspondence from a number of newswriting centres elsewhere. In this article we sketch the various postal systems that transversed Europe, and, crucially, how they were interconnected.