News Networks in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Let us begin with a question: what is news?No one will dispute that the category of news has a degree of transhistorical pertinence.But what do we mean by news-or nouvelles, notizie, noticias, notí cias, zeitungen, tijdingen, haber, newyddion?We know what the dictionaries say, but we equally know, from experience, that writing about the history of news, or more commonly writing about particular kinds of news, shares no consensus on a working historical definition.Most of the time it does not matter, because we are happy to run with a loose definition, but then it comes into play in debates about particular forms and about priorities which are affected by definitions-whether a monthly or biannual periodical should feature in histories of newspapers, for example, whether exact periodicity matters, whether issue numbering is an essential.That is to say, the definition of news is contested in discussions about inclusion and exclusion.This is not an exclusively modern problem.We can see the same paradigms being crossed in Jonson's 1626 play The Staple of News, in an exchange between Cymbal, the entrepreneur who runs the Staple, a news scriptorium, Fitton, his employee, and Penyboy Junior, a gullible customer: Fit.O Sir! it is the printing we oppose.Cym.We not forbid that any Newes, be made, But that 't be printed; for when Newes is printed, It leaves Sir to be Newes.while 'tis but written -Fit.Though it be ne're so false, it runnes Newes still.P. Ju.See divers mens opinions!unto some, The very printing of them, makes the Newes; That ha'not the heart to beleeve any thing, But what they see in print.1So what makes something news?Can we even say that it is something recent?Not really, because accounts of early-modern people exchanging news show 1 Ben Jonson, The Staple of Newes, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson [The second volume](London, 1631), p. 15.

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