The Flemish connection: socio-cultural news from London in the Ghendtsche post-tydingen (1667-1723)

The two case studies in this essay call attention to the Ghent newspaper Ghendtsche Post-tydingen (1667-1723) as a neglected source of information, not only on English theatrical matters but also-and primarily-on the political significance of such news items. Evidently, Ghendtsche Post-tydingen evinced a lively interest in developments both on the macro level (i.e. national and international politics) and on the micro level (i.e. socio-cultural news). Focusing on two sets of items published around the watershed Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, we argue that the seemingly trivial "human interest stories'' that find their way into GP offer us unsuspected but valuable insights into the sympathies and allegiances of particular groups of people in the Low Countries. As such, these news reports from London on the socio-cultural display surrounding different types of entertainment actually functioned as veiled indicators of political agency

Scissors, paste, and the female editor : the making of the Dutch women's magazine De Gracieuse (1862-64)

This article examines the popular long-running Dutch women’s magazine De Gracieuse (1862–1936). More particularly, it focuses on its foundation and first two years of publication (1862–64), before De Gracieuse became an official edition of—and almost identical to—the internationally successful German fashion and needlework magazine Der Bazar (1855–1936). Combining archival research of the publisher’s correspondence with digital searching of nineteenth-century periodical databases not only reveals the wide variety of foreign periodicals from which the early Gracieuse sourced material. It also reveals the formative input of three women working behind the scenes as editors. As this article will show, these women turned the common nineteenth-century practice of ‘scissors-and-paste’ journalism into a creative tool for shaping a new type of women’s magazine for the Dutch market