Joad Raymond

NEWSPAPERS: A NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON?

The history of newspapers is traditionally written from a national perspective. Paradoxically, however, the gathering and distribution of news undertaken by seventeenth century newspapers was transnational. This article shows some of the methodological problems this paradox raises. Through a case study of the weekly London newsbook Mercurius Politicus, it demonstrates the nature and significance of international news in seventeenth century Britain. The history of the early newspaper needs to be rewritten from the perspective of pan-European communication networks.

Introduction: networks, communication, practice

Thus begins Myles Davies’ idiosyncratic and boisterous Eikon Mikro-Biblion. Sive Icon Libellorum , Or A Critical History of Pamphlets (1715), the first attempt to write a long-term history of the pamphlet as a medium. Davies observed that one could find ‘the Genius of the Age’ in its pamphlets, thus positing a difference between the reader who read a pamphlet in order to engage with its argument, and the reader who sought a less involved, more objective perspective, the colder eye of the historian who read to find out what a pamphlet might disclose about the time or the society that produced it. His was a critical history of pamphlets. Davies’ detachment is imperfect*/throughout his meandering volumes he frequently becomes distracted by his attack on Arianism*/but his is nonetheless a brilliant and entertaining history of polemic, overwhelmed by rhetoric and undisciplined reading. In the preface (itself eleven-and-a-half sheets) Davies writes that it is in the nature of the pamphlet that it brings together, or spreads itself between, the full spectrum of human capacities. ‘Pamphlets become more and more daily amusements to the Curious, Idle and Inquisitive, Chat to the Talkative, Stories for Nurses, Fans for Misses, Food to the Needy, and Practicings to the News-Mongers . . .’ [2]. The sentence continues for another lungful. Pamphlets, Davies claims, are occasional conformists. Startlingly he includes in this list of wayward writings not only the secular and fabulous productions of romancers, novelists and newsmongers, common pamphleteers, but also the spiky prose of modern divines and the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts allegedly forged by rabbis and the Church. Every biblical figure seems to have his or her own gospel or apocalypse; ‘Ecclesiastical Pamphlets’ and ‘Libels’ Davies calls them. These are spurious writings, if not pamphlets in length, produced by false authority:

The history of newspapers and the history of journalism: Two disciplines or one?

Chapters in the History of British Journalism Seven‐volume set, 1998 London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press ISBN 0 415 18478 9, £450

News networks in early modern Europe

News Networks in Early Modern Europe attempts to redraw the history of European news communication in the 16th and 17th centuries. News is defined partly by movement and circulation, yet histories of news have been written overwhelmingly within national contexts. This volume of essays explores the notion that early modern European news, in all its manifestations – manuscript, print, and oral – is fundamentally transnational. These 37 essays investigate the language, infrastructure, and circulation of news across Europe. They range from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, focussing on the mechanisms of transmission, the organisation of networks, the spread of forms and modes of news communication, and the effects of their translation into new locales and languages.

John Streater and The Grand Politick Informer

A B ST R A CT. The soldier, puiblisher, and pamphleteer john Streater is a comparatively neglected political writer of the I65os, who represents the tuirning of the dispersed Levellers to classical repuiblicanism. In the I65os he is seen as a brave and uncompromising voice of opposition. In the auituimn of i653 he was prosecuited b3 Cromnwellfor publishing a work entitled The grand politick informer. This article rediscovers this publication, identifies it as Streaters first newsbook, and explores its implications for Streaters career and canon. In 1654 Streater wrote two series of newsbooks which criticized the Protectorate in an oblique fashion. The grand politick informer, a work of unbridledferocitj, shows that Streater learned to tame his voice after his I653 pirosecuition and imprisonment, and to couich his antagonism to the governmnent in the language of classical allusion.

Introduction: The Distribution and Dissemination of Popular Print

This collection explores the surprising ways by which cheap print moved across Europe, focussing on Italy, the Netherlands and Britain. Looking at pedlars, commerce and communication, it presents a model of textual dissemination and the material and economic premises of European landscapes of print.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION OF MARTIN CONBOY'S JOURNALISM: A CRITICAL HISTORY, LONDON: SAGE, 2004. (x + 246 pp., ISBN 0761940995,

Martin Conboy’s survey of the history of journalism and news publications offers a long-term account of the development of the ‘discourse of journalism’ from printed publications in the sixteenth century through the rise of newspapers and of journalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth to the new media, radio, television and the Internet, in the twentieth. A handful of books have tried to do this in the past. The Victorian era produced the first attempts to write scholarly histories of the English newspaper, including Frederick Knight Hunt’s The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers and of the Liberty of the Press (1850); Alexander Andrews’s The History of British Journalism, from the Foundation of the Newspaper Press in England, to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, with Sketches of Press Celebrities (1859); James Grant’s The Newspaper Press: Its Origin Progress and Present Position (1871); Henry Richard Fox Bourne’s English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism (1887); and also the writings of the belated Victorian J.G. Muddiman, A History of English Journalism (1908, written under the pseudonym J.B. Williams) and The King’s Journalist 1659 1689: Studies in the Reign of Charles II (1923). More recent works include Keith Williams, The English Newspaper: An Illustrated History to 1900 (1977); Geoffrey A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (1978); Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History (1979); Mitchell Stephens, A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (1988). All rely extensively on the sources, approach and narrative established by their Victorian predecessors. Conboy’s book differs from, and is an improvement on, its forerunners in several respects. First, it is more scholarly and more theoretically sophisticated. Secondly, it is, perforce, more up to date, as it is in a position to acknowledge some of the changes in journalistic practice that have taken place in the past decade. Though there is no more than a single mention of blogs (which are bringing new political pressures on the editors of news that appears in ‘dead-wood media’, and are, I would argue, an additional factor in the decline of serious investigative journalism), there is an account of the impact of digital news on TV programming, both in terms of the red button and of the expectations of immediacy in reporting and the consequences of this for the experience of periodicity. Thirdly, the unifying core of Conboy’s book is not the newspaper. It is journalism, journalism defined as a discourse, or, more precisely, a set of discursive practices. ‘Discourse’ is understood in a roughly Foucaultian sense, an account of text that

115 (hbk); 0761941002,

This contribution examines some of the key themes that recur throughout the volume, including: the materiality of books; the social interactions that gave books their meaning in sociable contexts, and that facilitated their distribution; the relevance of censorship; and the nature of the spaces in which those social interactions took place. The author suggests that book history, far from being a specialized discipline restricted to the history of texts, provides a useful tool with which to explore the history of human culture and human action more generally.

38.95 (pbk)).

The news is messy. This is a problem that we can only do so much to fix: and any patch will necessarily be temporary. This messiness is simply the nature of news. News is inserted into heterogeneous relationships: into diplomatic statecraft, coffeehouse conversations, the unlikely collocations and juxtapositions of printed gazettes, exchanges between neighbours. All unlike, and yet all share news, sometimes even the same piece of news, so news has to accommodate itself to these very different contexts. News can be any number of things, according to these relationships. And the media that are used to communicate news, whether sung, spoken, signed, written or printed, must be able to accommodate a variety of elements that count as news, including prefatory greetings and labels, unadorned intelligence, opinion or editorialising, and advertising. And news changes over time and space. The way it connects people in part depends on where it is: the ambassador reporting to the Council of Ten, the whispered information leaked in the piazetta or ‘Broglio’ outside the building, the gossip of the barbershop just along Merceria. These adjacent places are part of the same highly connected local newssharing network, yet each has their own conventions and relationships. News can cease to be news as it ages over time, or as it passes into different hands, mouths or ears. And news has a complicated temporality. It refers to a past that is in some way understood as recent, shared throughout a certain community, but it is also frequently deferred to future confirmation, to future developments that will reveal the true significance of the news in hand. Perhaps the moment of news is a turning point between fresh events and their yet-to-be-heard consequences. And look at any avviso from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, or a multi-event gazette or newspaper from the seventeenth. It describes, not necessarily in chronological order, a number of events in distinct paragraphs, with some paragraphs representing more than one event, each with a number of dates: the date of the event, perhaps the date the news was initially sent or received by an intermediary, the date of the letter in which the paragraph appears. And these paragraphs, each with two or three dates, will be combined into a news publication with a date range, the latest of which is likely to be the date of publication (which may mean, in the case of a printed item, that the text went to press the day before that stated on the title). Some events described will precede that date range. And these dates may well belong to different calendars. By any standards this expresses a complex temporality: one that bibliographers and especially library cataloguers have been reluctant to engage with. The anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as ‘matter out of place’; but with news there was no agreed, well-defined place. The news is a mess and so doing anything with it—in 1602 or in 2016—requires a system. George Thomason’s mid-seventeenth-century Media History, 2017 Vol. 23, No. 2, 303–309, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2016.1270748

Matter, Sociability and Space: Some Ways of Looking at the History of Books

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