'The shameless men who torment paper, press and pen' (original) (raw)
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Print Media and 17th-Century Society in England
The function of the new media in seventeenth-century England Until recently, historians have assumed that the British masses did not have access to complex media or information about current events because of widespread illiteracy and the physical inaccessibility of the nation's remote regions. On the contrary: more so than ever before, media were ubiquitous aspects of seventeenthcentury British society, and there was an unprecedented array of information available to those who wanted it. Unparalleled by any other time in British history before (or relatively speaking, since) the time of the British Civil War, "ordinary people were part of an elaborate network of information" ("Political Discourse in 17th C." 164).
During the Mid-Seventeenth Century, Europe experienced a revolutionary wave whose impact transcended the borders of single countries. The years 1647-48 represent the apex of a long period of challenges to political powers. The outcomes (i.e. the British Revolution, the Neapolitan Rebellion and the French Fronde, just to mention the most relevant ones) would changed profoundly the political, social and cultural framework of the Old Continent. My paper tries to suggest that the dissemination of political information created the conditions through which new political ideas and practices were publicly developed, exchanged and debated throughout Early Modern Europe. It analyses information which passed through diplomatic channels, for instance, manuscript and printed gazettes between Florence and the British Isles sent by the Tuscany envoy in London, Amerigo Salvetti; or the news flow between the Roman Curia and the Apostolic Nuncio to Ireland, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. These examples will prove not only how the diplomatic entourage reported on similar events, but also how it reacted to exceptional conjunctures. Moreover, my paper will try to figure out the movement of news not only through the geographical space but also within a variegated media landscape. Through the analysis of the contents and materiality of information, on the one hand, we will see how news went from a manuscript from to a printed one; on the other, their renegotiation in other cultural contexts following their translation in different languages and the appearance in different early modern political arena. This approach could help us link again not only important events which were artificially separated by the narrative of national historiographies, but also to balance the dichotomy of some historical categories, such as printing/writing and public/private.
The man-as-media represents a constructive, socially engaged and relatively structured response to the functioning of traditional media and certain characteristics of the social and political life in the modern society. We find its roots in the phenomena of samizdat in the countries of the Soviet bloc, les mazarinades that emerged and experienced expansion in the period of La Fronde uprising (1648-1653) in the Kingdom of France, manuscript newsletters, broadsides, bulletins, pamphlets and separates in England in early XVII century as well as the media activity of Giuseppe Impastato (1948-1978). In this article we will pay attention to the British society in the XVII century and phenomena such as manuscript newsletters, broadsides, bulletins, pamphlets and separates. Keywords: manuscript newsletters, separates, bulletins, pamphlets, broadsides.
SEDERI 9, 1998
The interface between literature and popular culture is one of the ‘North-West passages’ that currently fascinate me. The other one is the interface between political ideas as formulated by political leaders and thinkers on the one hand, and on the other the reception and re-formulation of these ideas at the ‘receiving end’, viz. by the illiterate or semi-literate masses of early-modern England. During the early modern period, they were periodically thrown into the political arena by the factious behaviour of their self-styled ‘betters’ who usually kept preaching of degree and obedience when addressing the so-called rabble. These two ‘North-West passages’ of intellectual history and mentality history are epistemological siblings. Whoever attempts to define the terms of the debate encounters the same methodological maelstrom, and the eye of the maelstrom is always the definition of ‘the people’. For indeed, how can we know what they thought, since they left nothing in print or script behind them? how can we know with certainty that the cheaper sort of printed material was intended for those classically called ‘the people’? and who should be included under that name ‘the people’? and how cheap were those printed goods? and how cheap to ‘the people’, whoever they were? And ultimately: is there such a thing as ‘the people’? are there not subjective connotations in the uses of this term? The danger would then be the depiction an ideal pastoral universe, something one could call with nostalgia in one’s voice and a tear in one’s eye ‘the world we have lost’. But I fail to see why we should be content with the descriptions of the people as being the mob, the rabble, the many-headed monster, or the multitude. The ‘popular culture’ I will try to study here is on print. Therefore if some of the mass of the English people —or population— had access to it, it must have been through public readings, in the home, in the tavern, in the village square, in the street, but like much of the reading that was taught and performed in those days, it was part of an oral culture. The printed word was, in most of its social uses, a spoken word for those who received its content. Some would define it as chapbook literature, as a commodity for the pedlar’s pack, and they would be right: pedlars did indeed carry along in their bags broadside ballads, murder pamphlets, scaffold speeches, witch trials, monstrous births in broadside-ballad form with appropriately shocking woodcuts to bring water to the mouths of the Mopsas and Trinculos of so-called merry old England, and to open their purses. If they could not read, someone would read the text to them. The ballad vendor would sing it to them. The memory skills that participants in oral cultures have always developed and still do develop were a most extraordinary substitute for literacy. Of the works I will examine here, none is longer than eighteen pages. All but one were printed in London. The exception, on which I will more particularly focus, was printed in Oxford. It will provide me with an ironical corrective to my initial enthusiasm about the ‘popular literature’ topos which I have just introduced. This paper is very much indebted to the writings of Margaret Spufford, Peter Lake, Kevin Sharp, Tessa Watt, David Cressy, Ronald Hutton, Keith Thomas, Roger Chartier, Daniel Roche, Robert Muchembled, and François Laroque.
Royalist Print and Textual Space, 1643-1646
In recent years there has been a surge of interest in both royalism and print culture during the middle of the seventeenth century. Royalist print and its subversive nature during the 1650s have been of particular interest. Much research has been conducted on the production, circulation, readership, politics and messages of royalist newsbooks and pamphlets printed in the years following Charles I’s execution. This paper aims to build on these interests by focusing on the key royalist newsbooks of the first civil war, such as Mercurius Aulicus. The underpinning concept of this paper is that royalist newsbooks between 1643 and 1646 offer a different view of the royalist cause which needs to be considered. An exploration of the physicality, characteristics and themes of royalist newsbooks forms the basis of this work, with the intention of developing new insights into the nature and identity of royalism. The suggestion is that royalist newsbooks relied on their physical features to assert their authority, and that they attempted to control meaning in order to align the king’s cause with an English identity.