This history of early modern news focuses on news itself rather than specific material forms. Centering on movement through different media, time, and place, it makes the case for a truly comparative, pan-European history of news. After the Introduction, the second section, News Moves, explores how we think about and research news culture and news communication, demonstrating movement is more important than static forms. The third, News Sings, focuses on news ballads, comparing actors, publics, music, and soundscapes of ballad singing in several European cities, highlighting the central role of immaterial elements, such as sound, music and voice. The fourth, News Counts, argues that seeing news the way a machine might read it-through its metadata-is one way of moving beyond form, allowing us to find surprising commonalities in news cultures which differ greatly in both time and place.

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.

This history of early modern news focuses on news itself rather than specific material forms. Centering on movement through different media, time, and place, it makes the case for a truly comparative, pan-European history of news. After the Introduction, the second section, News Moves, explores how we think about and research news culture and news communication, demonstrating movement is more important than static forms. The third, News Sings, focuses on news ballads, comparing actors, publics, music, and soundscapes of ballad singing in several European cities, highlighting the central role of immaterial elements, such as sound, music and voice. The fourth, News Counts, argues that seeing news the way a machine might read it-through its metadata-is one way of moving beyond form, allowing us to find surprising commonalities in news cultures which differ greatly in both time and place.

News in Early Modern Europe presents new research on the nature, production, and dissemination of a variety of forms of news writing from across Europe during the early modern period.

Modern communications allow the instant dissemination of information and images, creating a sensation of virtual presence at events that occur far away. This sensation gives meaning to the notions of 'real time' and of a 'present' that is shared within and among societies”in other words, a sensation of contemporaneity. But how were time and space conceived before modernity? When did this begin to change in Europe? To help answer such questions, this volume looks at the exchange of information and the development of communications networks at the dawn of journalism, when widespread public and private networks first emerged for the transmission of political news. What happened in Prague quickly reached Venice, and what happened in Naples was soon the talk of Hamburg. Gradually, enough became known about daily affairs around Europe for people to begin to think in terms of a 'shared present'. An analysis of contemporaneity adds a new dimension to the study of the origins of news and media history, as well as to the origins of a European identity. For whilst our understanding of the circulation of manuscript newsletters and printed reports has increased in recent years, much less is known about the impact of this burgeoning journalism on a pan-European scale. Each essay in this volume explores the ways in which this international impact helped foster a developing sense of contemporaneity that encompassed not just single countries, but Europe as a whole. Taken together the collection offers the first panoramic view of the way stories were born, grew and matured during their transmission from source to source, from country to country. The results published here suggest that a continent-wide network, including manuscript and print, for the transmission of stories from place to place, existed and was effective.

Looking beyond the emergence of print, this collection of ground-breaking essays highlights the pivotal role of theology in the formation of the early modern cultures of communication.

In this groundbreaking book, Nina Lamal provides a compelling account of Italian information and communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries, casting an entirely new light on the keen Italian interest and involvement in this protracted conflict.