State communication and public politics in the Dutch Golden Age

Funding: The British Academy has generously supported the author since 2020 as part of their Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme, which has also enabled the author to publish this work in the British Academy Monograph series.State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age describes the political communication practices of the authorities in the early modern Netherlands. Der Weduwen provides an in-depth study of early modern state communication: the manner in which government sought to inform its citizens, publicise its laws, and engage publicly in quarrels with political opponents. These communication strategies, including proclamations, the use of town criers, and the printing and affixing of hundreds of thousands of edicts, underpinned the political stability of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Based on systematic research in thirty-two Dutch archives, this book demonstrates for the first time how the wealthiest, most literate, and most politically participatory state of early modern Europe was shaped by the communication of political information. It makes a decisive case for the importance of communication to the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the extent to which early modern authorities relied on the active consent of their subjects to legitimise their government.Publisher PD

An unknown early monthly journal of the Netherlands: Joost Smient and Den Nederlantse Mercurius (1665)

This article examines one of the earliest periodicals published in the Dutch Republic, the hitherto unknown Nederlantse Mercurius (1665). Only a single issue of this monthly journal has survived, but its publication history can be enriched considerably thanks to extant newspaper advertisements. This article investigates the Nederlantse Mercurius in the context of the growth of the periodical market in the seventeenth century; in the context of the career and family ties of the man responsible for the journal, the Amsterdam printer Joost Otto Smient, a young publisher launching his first independent venture; and in the context of the European news market.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The politics of print in the Dutch Golden Age : the Ommelander Troubles (c. 1630-1680)

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A Nordic press : the development of printing in Scandinavia and the Baltic states before 1700 from a European perspective

Printing emerged more slowly in the Nordic lands than in most parts of Europe. The first active printing press in modern Latvia appeared in 1588; Estonia, Finland and Norway would wait until the 1630s and 1640s respectively. It was also in the seventeenth century that a provincial print trade of any significance would develop in Denmark and Sweden, the two main political powers of the region. While our knowledge of the evolution of printing in the Scandinavian region has long been well established, the print culture of the Nordic lands is often still approached from national perspectives. In this article, we propose to consider the print output of the entire Nordic region – Denmark, the Scandinavian Peninsula, Iceland, Estonia and Latvia – as a single corpus. Using the resources of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project, we will consider what elements unite the history of printing in the region, as well as how distinct Nordic print culture is from that of the rest of Europe. We will consider especially the role of institutions (the church, crown, universities and colleges), foreign agents and linguistic traditions in shaping the print output of the Nordic region before 1700. What emerges from this study is a clear portrayal of the extent to which the Scandinavian book world takes inspiration and diverges from broader European norms. This article will make the case strongly for the importance of studying print culture in a comparative international perspective, and offers broader conclusions on the crucial interactions between print, power and peripheries in early modern Europe.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Book trade catalogues : from bookselling tool to book historical source

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Towards a complete bibliography of seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers : Delpher and its applications

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic provided fertile ground for the expansion of the serial press. In 1946, the Swedish bibliographer Folke Dahl documented this extraordinary dynamism in Dutch Corantos, 1618-1650. He provided the first tentative bibliography of early Dutch newspapers. Since Dahl’s publication, repeated calls have gone out for the extension of his bibliography to the end of the seventeenth century. The failure to do so is in part due to the dispersed nature of the holdings of seventeenth-century newspapers. Here Delpher is an enormous aid to the compilation of a bibliography of all seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers. It provides a unique platform on which dispersed collections are brought together. Scans of newspapers in Moscow, Oldenburg, London, and Amsterdam are displayed on one digital database where content can be rapidly described, typographical developments observed, publication trends easily compared, and variants discovered. Still, the creation of a bibliography can in no way rely purely on Delpher. The resource will not replace the valuable insights gained from detailed book-in-hand inspection of newspapers.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

News from Prague: The Bohemian Revolt and the Birth of the Dutch Newspaper (1618)

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An investigation of the social behaviour of archerfish Toxotes spp.

Sociality has evolved multiple times in animals. Social living is a balance between the advantages and disadvantages of the increased presence of conspecifics. These costs and benefits are especially prevalent when foraging, as both the chance to discover resources and the rate at which they are depleted increase with group size. This holds true for archerfish Toxotes spp., a genus known for shooting down terrestrial prey using concentrated jets of water. This hunting method leaves the shooters open to theft, but whether and how their foraging behaviour and decision-making are affected by this threat is unclear. I investigated how group size affected aiming duration and shooting success, performed a pilot investigation into the use of video demonstrators for standardising social stimuli in such experiments, and tested whether archerfish socially learn target preferences when foraging in a group. I found evidence that archerfish decrease their aiming duration in the presence of more conspecifics. My results contradict previous research on kleptoparasitism in archerfish, mainly that the rate of kleptoparasitism is dependent on the behaviour of the shooter’s neighbours rather than group size. I also showed that archerfish avoid videos of conspecifics, although the explanation for this remains elusive. I attempted to find out whether archerfish can learn socially but instead found no evidence of learning. As scientists, we must study the natural world and share our findings with the public who fund our work. Accordingly, I created a tabletop role-playing style game based on archerfish ecology to test whether it could educate the public about my research and found that most participants improved their knowledge of archerfish. This thesis not only helps to further elucidate the social behaviour of archerfish but also illustrates how an animal’s ecology must be taken into consideration when conducting research and conveying the results to the public."This work was supported by a BBSRC Eastbio PhD studentship awarded to Dagmar der Weduwen."--Fundin

From piety to profit : the development of newspaper advertising in the Dutch Golden Age

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Competition, choice and diversity in the newspaper trade of the Dutch Golden Age

This article expands on the themes of choice and diversity within a national, competitive news market in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. It is often suggested that early newspapers largely copied one another. But that did not mean that these newspaper publishers all made the same choices, or that they adopted the same tone. Rather, they embraced and copied what they liked, and ignored what they did not. The newspaper trade in the Dutch Republic was driven by competition, innovation and diversity. The standards of what made a “good” newspaper were constantly refined during the seventeenth century. Publishers made conscious choices concerning the style, format, price and content of their papers in order to maximise their commercial potential. The diversity of titles was vital to the stimulation and later sustenance of the growing market for periodical news. News readers in the Dutch Republic were offered the greatest range of titles, complementing one another in content and style. If we look close enough at the titles available to us, we can come to a refined understanding of the early burgeoning business of news.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe