Marcel Broersma, ‘A Daily Truth. The Persuasive Power of Early Modern Newspapers’, in: J. W. Koopmans and N. H. Petersen eds., Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period: Legitimation of Authority (Leuven, Paris and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2011), pp. 19-36. (original) (raw)
Related papers
News in Early Modern Europe, 2020
, in which the first news about the Lisbon earthquake is published. Copy in Stadsarchief Amsterdam (Amsterdam City Archives), photograph by Joop Koopmans 25 1.2 De Voorlooper van de Groninger Dingsdaagsche Courant [The Forerunner of the Groningen Tuesday Newspaper]. Copy in Universiteitsbibliotheek Groningen (University Library Groningen) 28 3.1 Number and types of religious references from each reporting system 67 3.2 Distribution of violence vocabulary by frequency category for each major reporting region 72 3.3 Distribution of words from Category A between stories about Poland and stories about the Ottomans 73 3.4 Distribution of words from Category B between stories about Poland and stories about the Ottomans 74 5.1 We have brought our hogs to a fair market: or, Strange newes from New-Gate (1652), part of p. 5, showing the image of Charles I. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library,
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.
News, newspapers and the transatlantic - conference paper
2014
This paper begins to explore two relatively recent developments in the historiography of the long-eighteenth century. The first concerns the history of news and newspapers; the second, the genesis and development of 'American' self-identity. Scholarly interest in the shaping of news has led to a number of recent publications which help broaden our understanding of what news is, and its historicity. As the subtitle suggests, Andrew Pettegree's 2014 monograph, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself, combines the twin concepts of news and self-identity. 1 And, in 2011, Daniel O'Quinn published his exploration of the 'reconstitution of British subjectivities' that took place during American War of Independence. O'Quinn neatly links the real and imagined spaces of the newspaper and theatrical performance to point out the thirst for 'news' and its relation to how Britons thought about themselves during the loss of Empire. He also highlights the commercial impetus behind the press and stage, noting on John Wilkes' novel -and illegal -publication of parliamentary debates in the Middlesex Journal, the Gazetteer and the London Evening Post in 1771, that 'Wilkes and his supporters pushed on the limits of the law for political reasons, but the printers wanted to print parliamentary debates because they sold papers. Readers wanted access to parliamentary debate because of the intense interest in the furore surrounding events in America.' 2
Andrew Pettegree. The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself
The American Historical Review, 2015
Historians of early modern Europe have for several decades been publishing detailed monographs on the evolution of the institutional arrangements that government officials, merchants, journalists, and professionals relied on in the period between 1450 and 1800 to make sense of the wider world. In The Invention of News, the distinguished University of St. Andrews historian Andrew Pettegree synthesizes this scholarship in a sparkling overview that should prove useful both to specialists taking stock of their field and to general readers curious about the historical foundations of journalistic practices takenfor-granted today. Pettegree's chronological bookends are the advent of printing in the 1450s, an innovation that for the first time made it possible for news to become part of popular culture (2), and the eighteenth-century "Age of Revolution," an epoch during which news not only accounted for unfolding events, but also played an "influential role in shaping them" (2). To render his topic manageable, Pettegree organizes his narrative around a deceptively simple question: When did news first become a "commercial commodity"? (2) In his justly praised Book in the Renaissance (2010) Pettegree demonstrated how a business history of publishing could provide a fresh perspective on the first century of printing. In Invention he brings an analogous sensibility to the history of news. In both books, he is concerned more with publishers than with printersor, for that matter, with the writers whose ideas circulated far and wide. The "prime considerations" that governed the news business in early modern Europe, Pettegree explains, were factors over which its purveyors could exert at least a modicum of control: namely, the speed with which news traveled, its reliability, the ability of its publishers to retain control over content, and its entertainment value (13). The history of news, Pettegree emphasizes, should not be conflated with the history of the newspaper. In fact, the newspaper would only emerge in the 1600s, and would long coexist with two other commercially successful printed news genres, namely, the pamphlet and the periodical journal. Pamphlets
'The shameless men who torment paper, press and pen'
UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION: This dissertation seeks to shed light on an overlooked, yet important, aspect of early-modern England: the influence of manuscript newsletters on the history of the written word, specifically the dissemination of information. It is an original, comparative analysis between manuscript newsletters and printed corantos. Looking particularly at their common foundations in Anglo-centricity on their reporting of the Thirty Years’ War, to determine their contributions and influence upon the formation and emergence of the newsbook. It uses a variety of archival sources, both printed and manuscript from a range of collections. It will pay particular attention to the correspondence of Viscount Scudamore, because it covers the majority of the twenty years under review and will give a sense of perceptible change throughout the period. Manuscript newsletters were a premium service, exclusive to the elite of society. They provided superior information compared to that of regulated print. This dissertation will seek to determine why this monopoly on useful information largely came to an end by 1640. It will argue that the heavy regulation during the 1630s provided the environment to allow for printed news to reinvent itself, and subsequently adopt the successful aspects formerly attributed to manuscript newsletters. This reinvention also coincided with the repeal of stringent regulation in 1638 and of the ecclesiastical agenda by 1640. Furthermore, England’s disconnectedness from the Thirty Years’ War allowed for this change in focus in such a short time. All of these developments eventually resulted in manuscripts largely becoming redundant by 1640, yet their legacy held within the emergent newsbook testifies to its influence during this period. Ultimately it will use this comparison to demonstrate the popularisation of printed news; which was enabled by, further encouraged, and helped to enforce the increasing complexity of the social hierarchy in England during the long seventeenth-century.