Cromwell's Edinburgh press and the development of print culture in Scotland

Alasdair Mann, the noted scholar of book culture in early modern Scotland, has suggested that a significant change had occurred in Scotland's relationship with the printed word by the late seventeenth century. This study sets out to explain how the interregnum served as a ‘watershed’ during which a consumer demand was created for popular print and how this in turn necessitated a significant increase in the production and distribution of printed material. Beginning with the sale of the press and patent of Evan Tyler to the London Stationers’ Company in 1647, the article charts the key factors that transformed Scotland's printing industry from the production of official declarations and works for foreign markets to the production of polemical texts for a Scottish audience. These developments also witnessed publication of the first serial news journal and the growth of a competitive market for up-to-date printed news. More than just an anomaly that flourished during a decade of occupation, these fundamental changes altered Scotland by introducing the large-scale consumption of chapbooks and printed ephemera, thereby initiating the nation's enduring print culture

The Lexicons of Early Modern News

Saggio comparativo sui termini che definiscono gli oggetti della comunicazione in Europ

European Postal Networks

During the early sixteenth century state postal routes, based on a sequence of horses ridden by a single rider across a series of organised stages, were developed across Europe and were progressively transformed into public services. Postal communication was fundamental to European news, and though they were by no means the only basis of communication they formed the essential spine to news networks.1 We have two working assumptions: the first, that the penetration of avvisi into the public culture of early-modern Europe (i.e. beyond official communications) depended on the development of accessible postal services. The second is that (relatively) predictable public postal deliveries, which developed out of state administrative needs and manuscript culture, including manuscript news, were a precondition for the development of a (relatively) periodic newspaper press. Once newspapers were established, they could draw in communications from other types of network connection (merchants, churches and monasteries, booksellers, diplomatic couriers, soldiers, travellers, ships’ captains, and so on), but to be widely established in the first place they needed reliable public posts, bringing correspondence from a number of newswriting centres elsewhere. In this article we sketch the various postal systems that transversed Europe, and, crucially, how they were interconnected.Durante el siglo XVI, las rutas postales estatales, basadas en una sucesión de caballos montados por un solo ciclista a través de una serie de etapas organizadas, se desarrollaron en toda Europa y se transformaron progresivamente en servicios públicos. La comunicación postal era fundamental para las noticias europeas y, aunque no eran en modo alguno la única base de comunicación, formaban la columna vertebral esencial de las redes de noticias.1 Tenemos dos suposiciones de trabajo: la primera, que la penetración de la avvisi en la cultura pública de las primeras (Es decir, más allá de las comunicaciones oficiales) dependía del desarrollo de servicios postales accesibles. La segunda es que las entregas postales públicas (relativamente) predecibles, que se desarrollaron a partir de las necesidades administrativas del estado y de la cultura manuscrita, incluidas las noticias manuscritas, eran una condición previa para el desarrollo de una prensa periodística (relativamente) periódica. Una vez que se establecieron los periódicos, podían recurrir a comunicaciones de otros tipos de conexión de red (comerciantes, iglesias y monasterios, libreros, correos diplomáticos, soldados, viajeros, capitanes de buques, etc.), pero ser ampliamente establecidos en primer lugar Necesitaban puestos públicos fiables, trayendo correspondencia de un número de centros de redacción de noticias en otros lugares. En este artículo bosquejamos los diversos sistemas postales que atravesaban Europa, y, crucialmente, cómo estaban interconectados

Books in the News in Cromwellian England

This article offers detailed analysis of the patterns of book advertising in Marchamont Nedham’s government-sponsored newsbook, Mercurius Politicus. It contends that, for a brief period, Politicus was the nearest thing that the mid-seventeenth century had to a literary periodical and contests standard accounts that Politicus was only successful because government monopoly made it so. Instead I show that Politicus was instrumental in creating an image of the Commonwealth and Protectorate as a Republic of Letters; the cheap print of its small advertisements insisted that the publication of a book was an event, that London was a city of the book, and that its inhabitants might respond to the uncertainty of political revolution by eagerly imagining a future comprised of new books as yet unread

European communication networks in the Early Modern Age

Recent contributions to knowledge about early journalism developed in different parts of Europe*Italy, France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain . . . *have made it possible to trace a fairly precise map for the historical origin of this phenomenon. However, the scope of work carried out with a view to developing frameworks of interpretation to explain the reasons for this appearance is not as far-reaching. This paper reviews the recurring theoretical models found to date in the specific bibliography and proposes a new framework of interpretation, capable of encompassing the complexity and pan-European nature of early journalism in history

When The News Was Sung: Ballads as News Media in Early Modern Europe

News songs differ in crucial ways to the other news media of the early modern period like newsletters, newspapers, or diplomatic correspondence – they differ even from the prose broadsheets and pamphlets that they so closely resemble. As historians of news we need to ask different kinds of questions of these multi-media artifacts. For example, how does the presentation in a performative genre affect the dissemination and reception of information about events? What part do orality and aurality play in how the news was sold and received? Here the activities and social status of street singers play an important role. We must consider the production, format and distribution of these songs in order to understand their impact. We also need to pay attention to the conjunction between text and melody, and the ways in which this affected the presentation of a news event. On a broader scale, what kind of information can ballads provide about specific news events that other documents cannot or will not provide? Can they offer us a new medium by which to interpret historical events? And lastly, how should historians deal with these profoundly emotive texts? The combination of sensationalist language and affecting music meant that songs had the potential to provoke a more powerful response than any other contemporary news source, and this emotional potency can at times be challenging for a modern historian to decipher and explain. This article will attempt to answer some of these questions and suggest some of the skills we as historians need to develop in order to appreciate the full meaning of songs as the most popular of news media in early modern Europe