Early Modern News Networks in Rennes – A Report on the Meeting (in Spanish)

This is an account of the proceedings at the latest meeting of News Networks, written by Carmen Espejo (and mirrored on the Historia del Periodismo en Andalusia website – please visit!) :

NEWS NETWORKS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE – WORKSHOP II: RENNES, MAY 9th-11th 2012 LANGUAGE, GEOGRAPHY, RELIGION, RANK

Entre los días 9 y 11 de mayo de 2012 se celebró en Rennes (Francia) el II Encuentro de la Red “News Networks in Early Modern Europe”, dedicado al tópico “Language, Geography, Religion, Rank”. Correspondió la apertura del encuentro a Mark Greengrass (University of Sheffield), quien disertó sobre el tema “Nobility and the Politics of Information in Sixteenth-Century France”. La presentación trató sobre la proliferación de los impresos políticos en los últimos años del siglo XVI, particularmente de los libelos, y acerca de las estrategias a través de las cuales la nobleza intentó controlar e instrumentalizar ese flujo de comunicación pública. A través de varios ejemplos, Greengrass demostró que los nobles desarrollaron entre los siglos XVI y XVII un espacio público discursivo comparable al que tendrá la burguesía en el siglo XVIII.
La segunda intervención corrió a cargo de Stéphane Haffemayer (Université de Caen), “La nouvelle en mots et en chiffres: structures d’un système d’information (la Gazette des années 1680)”. Haffemayer presentó algunos resultados de un proyecto en curso en el que se analiza el contenido de la Gazette fundada por Renaudot, en los números correspondientes a los años 1683, 1685 y 1689. Este análisis, realizado con software informático, se centra en la estructura interna del periódico, de manera que se proporciona abundante información sobre las noticias que el  periódico francés publicó (lugar del acontecimiento, volumen de la información – en número de palabras -, lugar de emisión, retraso en relación a la fecha del acontecimiento, etc.).
En la tarde de este mismo día 9 de mayo, André Belo (Université Rennes-2) presentó su trabajo “News Exchange and Social Distinction”, en el que afirmó que la práctica habitual de muchos lectores durante la Edad Moderna combinaba la lectura de noticias impresas y noticias manuscritas; en tanto que estas últimas tenían, entre otras virtualidades, la capacidad de autorregular su impacto en el público – gracias a la selección de su audiencia – gozaron de hecho de mayor reputación que las noticias impresas.
En la mañana del jueves 10 se celebró una mesa redonda en torno al tema “Tha national vocabularies of news”. Carmen Espejo (Universidad de Sevilla), André Belo (Université Rennes-2), Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia) y Paul Arblaster (Zuyd University, Maastricht) compararon los campos léxicos del primer periodismo en los respectivos territorios sobre los que trabajan. Se puso de manifiesto la exuberancia de estos campos en todas las lenguas europeas, seguramente como consecuencia de la experimentación constante en el mercado de los primeros editores de periódicos; así como la práctica sincronía con la que las denominaciones más comunes – aviso, gaceta… – van apareciendo por toda Europa y en todas las lenguas.
A continuación Mario Infelise (Università Ca’Foscari, Venecia) trató sobre “The origins and use of the term Gazette”. En su trabajo rastreó la idea, recurrente en diccionarios e historias generales, que atribuye el origen del término a una moneda veneciana de pequeño valor que se pudo haber utilizado para pagar los primeros productos periodísticos manuscritos o impresos. Sin embargo, persisten las dudas sobre esta posibilidad. Infelise añadió otras posibilidades: “gazzetta” por ejemplo pudo haber sido un término de la lengua coloquial que denominaba las diversas actuaciones que en las plazas italianas de principios de la Edad Moderna realizaban buhoneros de todo tipo. En cualquier caso se emplea siempre, en estos primeros momentos, con intencionalidad peyorativa.
En la sesión de tarde la primera presentación fue la de Johann Petitjean (École Française de Rome), “L’information comme configuration, ou comment les papes s’informaient sur l’Empire ottoman et la Mediterranée orientale”. Quedó demostrado en su trabajo que el Papado tenía establecido un complejo sistema de control de la información que fluía desde el Mediterráneo oriental. Este sistema, que incluía la recopilación y la síntesis de los avisos privados recibidos, sirvió después de modelo para los avisos públicos.
Marion Brétéché (París – Sorbonne) ofreció la última presentación del jueves, disertando sobre el tema “Entre plume et presse(s). Publier l’actualité politique en français depuis la Hollande au tournant des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles”. En ella presentó las conclusiones de su estudio sobre la actividad de diversos gaceteros franceses que trabajaron en Holanda, y que a menudo compaginaron la actividad como gaceteros privados – a través de cartas manuscritas – y gaceteros públicos – a través de los periódicos -.
En la mañana del viernes 11 se clausuró el encuentro con la presentación de Sara Barker (University of Exeter), “Problems and priorities when translating & printing continental news in Early Modern England”. En esta presentación adelantó algunos resultados de la investigación que con ayuda de soporte informático intenta analizar la traducción de panfletos periodísticos en Inglaterra durante la Edad Moderna. Los datos obtenidos permiten ya observar cuáles fueron las lenguas desde las que se tradujo con mayor frecuencia, cuáles fueron los temas que se seleccionaron habitualmente para estas traducciones, etc.
El II Encuentro de la red “News Networks in Early Modern Europe” terminó con una sesión de dedicada a conclusiones generales y a la identificación de temas de interés que serán abordados en los próximos encuentros.

 

Rennes and some thoughts about mapping communication networks

The Rennes meeting of the news networks in early modern Europe Leverhulme-funded project took place on 9-11 May at the Université Rennes 2. At this stage the project — which is exploring methodologies for writing a pan-European history of news communication — is by invitation only. At this event we heard papers from Mark Greengrass (Sheffield), Stéphane Haffemayer (Caen), Johann Petitjean (Ecole Française de Rome), Marion Brétéché (Paris-Sorbonne), and Sara Barker (Exeter), as well as presentations from the core participants of the network.

Much as I’d like to summarise all the themes that arose in discussion — proposed projects, the quite strong disagreements about approaches and the relations between manuscripts and printed items — there’s too much to digest here. Instead I want to pick on a practical issue that we deliberated on from several angles: how we should map the networks of communication along which news flowed across Europe.

One way we’re approaching our project is by drawing up case studies — of particular news forms, modes of communication, events — and seeing how they interconnect. I’ve recently written a paper about the response to Milton’s Defensio (1650) in which I chart dialogues about Milton’s book across Europe over time, using colour-coded arrows and circles on a roughly contemporaneous map. If we were to do this using a shared map, then the case studies that we collectively compiled could be superimposed one on another, and the most connected centres or nodes, and the various permutations of the relationships between these nodes would (might) become evident. At least in an ideal world. But also in a nightmare world, in which all relationships are reduced to cartography.

Of course one problem is that maps change over time. Political boundaries shift, dominion disappears. That has a simple practical solution: we need to use a map that represents mountains, rivers, coastlines, cities, and not political boundaries. But even this might mislead, by leading to too mechanical an understanding of the movement of news and manuscripts and books. There is too much that resists the paradigm of a map. The movement of news needs to be understood in a more culturally-inflected manner, by which I mean that a range of factors — from prevailing understandings of time and space and movement down to the economics of production and consumption — shape not only the movement of news but what it means in society. Distribution not only enables interpretation but also influences it.

Mark Greengrass offered a useful phrase, to describe what is lost by seeing the emergence of periodical news too mechanically: “l’imaginaire des nouvelles”. What else constitutes this  ”l’imaginaire des nouvelles”? Suggestions please, and we’ll follow them up.

Nonetheless we still need to know how books and papers moved. So at the next workshop, to be held somewhere in the former Hapsburg Empire in late summer, we will consider the various distribution networks that extended across Europe. Using our local expertise — in Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy — we will trace the main means by which books and papers were transported, and at what speeds, by carrier, postal services, merchant routes. Anything that seems relevant, or reconstructable; I suspect that what works in Britain won’t in Italy; and that Spain’s routes are more esoteric and personal than the Dutch Republic’s. Then, on a shared map, we will find the points at which these networks intersected. We may even find the boundaries of some of our networks. And even if we find ourselves discussing fundamentally different incompatible things, we will have learned something about the chaos inherent in Europe, or the differing intellectual and scholarly frameworks within which our colleagues are working.

If you have any thoughts about the practicalities or illusions of this approach we would be interested in hearing from you.

News Networks meets in Rennes – Programme

The second meeting of News Networks will take place in two weeks’ time, kindly hosted by the Université Rennes 2.  Discussions will focus on the national vocabularies and terminologies of early modern news, French news in translation, the circulation and reception of news among different social groups, the social differences between news media, the Gazette de France, and case studies of the Franco-Dutch and Ottoman-Venetian axes of news transmission.  We’re delighted to welcome a number of distinguished associate contributors; the full programme of speakers and paper titles, for what we hope will be an extremely interesting and fruitful workshop, is as follows:

1) ‘The circulation and uses of news among French provincial gentry in the late 16^th Century’ (Mark Greengrass, University of Sheffield))

2) ‘La nouvelle en mots et en chiffres: structures d’un système d’information’ (la Gazette des années 1680).  (Stéphane Haffemayer, Université de Caen)

3) ‘News exchange and social distinction: some examples from France and Portugal’ (André Belo, Université de Rennes 2)

4) The national vocabularies of news (Paul Arblaster, André Belo, Carmen Espejo, Joad Raymond)

5) ‘The origins and use of the term ‘Gazette’’ (Mario Infelise, Universita Ca’ Foscari, Venice)

6) ‘Problems and priorities when translating continental news in Early Modern England’ (Sara Barker, University of Exeter)

7) ‘Entre plume et presse(s). Publier l’actualité politique en français depuis la Hollande au tournant des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’ (Marion Brétéché, Paris-IV Sorbonne)

8) ‘L’information comme configuration, ou comment les papes s’informaient sur l’Empire ottoman et la Méditerranée orientale’ (Johann Petitjean, Ecole Française de Rome)

Further news, announcements, and reports on the proceedings will be appearing on this blog, and on the project website, in due course.

What’s Newsworthy?

This week the following image came to my attention. It is fair, succinct and funny.   The historian of news, or of journalism, may quibble with the attribution of 1456 as the birthdate of printed news – the invention of the moveable type printing press and the advent of newsprint are not the same thing – but we tend to accept without complaint ‘press’ as a metonym for news.

The concept of news is in some sense as old as the idea of human community.  This is scarcely relevant to the joke, whose point is about standards of what is considered newsworthy, but the arbitrary selection of a date to satisfy the joke’s formal requirements might provoke some reflections.  If news as a concept or a cultural force has no readily identifiable origin, what about the idea of the newsworthy? After all, any news-writer or -teller is applying some criteria of selection to the news he or she chooses to deliver: this (within the constraints of time/space/ideology/propriety/law) is worthy of your attention, that is not.  Is it possible to trace the conceptual history of newsworthiness back into the early modern period?

In one sense, the matter is easy: what was considered newsworthy was what got published.  In another it’s more elusive, since newsworthiness is a matter of the consumer’s taste as well as the producer’s ethics and practices.  The word itself is of surprisingly recent vintage – OED’s first recorded use is from the 1930s.  An earlier articulation of the same idea, the New York Times‘s “All the news that’s fit to print” slogan, entangles the history of newsworthiness in the social and class constructs of the late 19th century, to say nothing of the commercial rivalries of American tycoons (the phrase was conceived as a swipe at the sensationalism and prurience of the Hearst newspapers.)

In certain aspects of early modern news culture, such as the manuscript newsletter or the gathering of diplomatic intelligence, the subject matter of news is presumed to be more narrowly reflective of the known interests of its audience than is the case with print news, and the criteria for inclusion thus correspondingly easier to discern.  Even where we can see a principle of discrimination at work, however, it isn’t always clear that the distinctions enforced necessarily imply a hierarchy of news.  Take the 18th-century Parisian example (supplied by Robert Darnton) of Mme Doublet , at whose house a coterie of informed people gathered to share and, more, to establish the news: “When [the guests, known as 'parishioners'] entered the salon, they reportedly found two large registers on a desk near the door. One contained news reputed to be reliable, the other, gossip. Together, they constituted the menu for the day’s discussion, which was prepared by one of Mme. Doublet’s servants, who may qualify as the first “reporter” in the history of France.”[1]  The division into fact and gossip does not imply a distaste for the latter; quite the reverse, or why was the gossip recorded separately instead of discarded?

Darnton’s subsequent investigation of the circulation of information (news and gossip) in print, manuscript and by word of mouth takes as its confessedly simplified starting position that in France under the Old Regime the worlds of statecraft and the court were not considered by the authorities of state to be legitimate subjects of public curiosity; they were the exclusive preserve of a narrowly circumscribed political class.  The history of newsworthiness thus has at least four possible overlapping definitions to contend with:

1. News that is of sufficient significance to bear repeating;
2. News that meets the professional standards of the news-giver;
3. News that is fit for public consumption;
4. A public that is fit to consume the news.

That fourth category problematises the historical status of newsworthiness.  Newsworthy is a term with a legal meaning; in many US states it’s one of the criteria used to determine whether the publication of a given story is invasive of a person’s privacy and thus actionable.  In that instance it’s taken to mean the question of whether the facts reported are of legitimate public concern.  Early modern authorities, in Britain and elsewhere, found this a troublesome question, and in practice the concept was fluid; Charles I, for example, banned altogether the printing of foreign corantos in England in 1632 after twelve years during which they were broadly tolerated in response to complaints from the Spanish ambassador about the proliferation of anti-Spanish sentiment in them. The history of newsworthiness may well run aground on the question of censorship; if it isn’t taken for granted that the general public constitutes a fit readership for news then neither public taste nor newswriter’s discrimination have free exercise.

Taking away the clouding issue of censorship doesn’t necessarily make the criteria of early modern newsworthiness any more accessible.  It’s often argued that the relaxation of censorship and the subsequent explosion of newsprint in Britain during the Civil Wars was down to a realisation on the part of the authorities on both sides that if it was not possible to eradicate the newsbooks of the opposition there was no virtue in muzzling their own partisans.  The newswriters on both sides frequently cast doubt on their counterparts’ veracity, religion, the reliability of their sources and (above all) the accuracy of their interpretations; yet the very urgency of the conflict between the two main parties ups the ante to the point where almost nothing which one side presented as news was considered too trivial to be contested by the other.

The difficulty in reaching an overarching conception of early modern newsworthiness may finally have to do with the plurality of its uses, contexts and identities, and the abiding tension over the public’s access to the news needs to be addressed with reference to these.  The forthcoming meeting of News Networks in Early Modern Europe in Rennes (May 9-11) will attempt to do precisely that, with papers focussing on the social differences between news media, and the ways in which these were fashioned, negotiated, and exploited by producers and consumers alike.

(NM)

---

[1] Robert Darnton, “Presidential Address: An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” The American Historical Review February 2000 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000001.html> (15 Mar. 2012).

Le Gazetier Universel

Muito útil, a biblioteca virtual Gazetier Universel, contando com mais de 500 títulos de periódicos em língua francesa dos séculos XVII e XVIII. O projeto foi lançado por Denis Reynaud em 2009, e continua a ser atualizado. Contém ainda a versão online de uma obra de referência sobre a imprensa francesa de Antigo Regime: o Dictionnaire des Journalistes, da autoria de Jean Sgard (editado em livro, hoje esgotado, em 1999); e páginas específicas sobre as gazetas europeias de língua francesa do século XVIII (como a Gazeta de Leyden ou o Courrier d’Avignon).

Este site ou conjunto de sites interligados continua aqui sob forma digital o rico, e já antigo, trabalho de uma série de especialistas franceses da imprensa de Antigo Regime, como Pierre Rétat, Jean Sgard e Claude Labrosse.

News Networks Meeting in Rennes

We are announcing a change of venue for the French meeting of News Networks; instead of Paris, as advertised, we will be meeting in Rennes from the 9th to the 11th of May 2012.  We are very pleased to be adding to the programme Professor Mark Greengrass and Dr Sara Barker, and will be adding more news of what promises to be a fascinating and convivial event in due course, here and at our website (www.newsnetworks.uea.ac.uk)

St Valentine, Patron of copulation

On 14 February 1646 — towards the end of the civil war — the London weekly newspaper The True Informer published the following editorial:

Episcopacy being abolished,* I see no reason why this day in which this book is extant, should be honoured in the commemoration of Bishop Valentine, or by what anomalous power of the Church of Rome, he should be made the Patron of copulation; there is no doubt but he was a Bishop, & I am afraid a very wanton one, for otherwise why should that lusty heat which in this pregnant season, make proud the blood, receive from his not only an allowance, but protection: Surely if his condition were correspondent to his title, everie piece of paper which the petulant youth weare this day in their hats, and every little scroule which the bashfull and conscious Virgins keep more concealed under their cuffe, are all but libells against his Gravity, whatsoever Epitome that custome heretofore have had I do believe the practice idle and unlawfull, yet peradventure as the Swedes will allow none to sell ale, or to keep such houses of hospitality, but unlesse such who serve their Ministers, because that by their neglect of sordid gaine, and the civility of their conversation they should give good examples unto others; so Antiquitie of Superstition, made this Bishop provident of this day, that in the remembrance of the excellence of his continence, and the severity of his life he might correct the fires and distempers of youth, which otherwise would be too unbridled and licentious; but of this enough …

[* the editor was jumping the gun: in fact the English Parliament would not formally abolish the episcopal system of church government by bishops until October 1646]

This facetious commentary on the role of the “Patron of copulation” (a nice phrase) explores a series of ironies. We aren’t really meant to believe that there is much chance of a bishop setting a good example to the youth, so the suggestion that St Valentines’ is a day of licensed licentiousness, which takes the edge off unbridled libidinousness, comments facetiously both on romantic conduct on that day and on the morality of Bishops. I wonder if there’s anything as rich in this morning’s papers.

It is an interesting and instructive example of the use of the newspaper for social commentary in the first half of the seventeenth century and of the simultaneous use of the newspaper for entertainment and humour.