Helmer Helmers

Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Whereas recent scholarship has analysed and theorized the practice of public diplomacy in modern international relations, early modern diplomacy is still often thought of in terms of peer-to-peer interaction and secrecy. This article seeks to show that public diplomacy was a central aspect of early modern international relations as well. While examining how, when, and why early modern diplomats communicated with foreign audiences, it argues that early public diplomacy opened up spaces for public debate and created transnational issues, and is therefore central to the history of news and the development of the public sphere.

The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age

During the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic was transformed into a leading political power in Europe, with global trading interests. It nurtured some of the periods greatest luminaries, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Descartes and Spinoza. Long celebrated for its religious tolerance, artistic innovation and economic modernity, the United Provinces of the Netherlands also became known for their involvement with slavery and military repression in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This Companion provides a compelling overview of the best scholarship on this much debated era, written by a wide range of experts in the field. Unique in its balanced treatment of global, political, socio-economic, literary, artistic, religious, and intellectual history, its nineteen chapters offer an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the world of the Dutch Golden Age.

Managing the News in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800

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? 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. 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, Nos. 3–4, 261–266, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2016.1234683

Religion and politics: Lucifer (1654) and Milton's Paradise Lost (1674)

Ever since the seventeenth century, Vondels Lucifer (1654) has been the subject of controversy. The bone of contention has always been the plays portrayal of the relationship between religion and politics. In order to throw into relief the politico-religious claim made in Lucifer , and to clarify the terms of the debate in which it intervened this chapter provides the play in relation to John Miltons Paradise Lost (1667/1674). The question of the sacredness of political authority was one of the central issues in the politico-religious debates and struggles of seventeenth- century Europe. The chapter focuses on the Anglo-Dutch dimension of the debate. In Lucifer , Heaven and earth are represented as separate but mirroring realms that both reflect the unapproachable, eternal light of God. The universe is structured according to repeating patterns which allow angels and men to enjoy divine order. Keywords: Lucifer ; Anglo-Dutch; debates; John Milton; Joost van den Vondel; Paradise Lost ; politics; religion

'The cry of the royal blood': revenge tragedy and the Stuart cause in the Dutch Republic

The Dutch Republic was pivotal in the royalist efforts. The Dutch editions of the Defensio are an interesting case for at least two reasons. First, notwithstanding the repeated ban, the editions proclaimed their status as royal propaganda with remarkable openness. In the second place, the prefatory poems in the vernacular editions signal an alliance between the royalist propagandists in the United Provinces and several members of the literary elite of Holland. This chapter provides understanding of the significance of that alliance, from the political as well as from the literary perspective. It explores the royalist rhetoric of revenge that was employed by Dutch poets and playwrights in response to the regicide, in some cases before the publication of the Defensio , but mostly after it. Keywords: Defensio ; Dutch poets; Dutch Republic; Holland; playwrights; prefatory poems; United Provinces; vernacular editions