13 August 1621 was a bad day for the printer Edward Allde. Along with the bookseller Thomas Archer, he was summoned before the court of the Stationers’ Company in London and informed that, at the request of the Secretary of State, he was to be imprisoned. More than that: his printing press was to be broken.[1] The government and the Stationers’ Company certainly didn’t want Allde printing any more. They weren’t to have their wish. Allde’s career in the early 1620s is an example both of the scattergun and rather ineffective English approach to censorship, and of the complex relationship of the English print market to European news networks.

What had Allde and Archer done to rattle the authorities to this extent? Their imprisonment has assumed great significance in the history of serialised printed news in England, due to a much-quoted postscript in a letter by the Cambridge scholar Joseph Mead, dated 22 September 1621. Mead writes that ‘My Corrantoer Archer was layd by the heeles for making or adding to Corrantoes &c as they say’.[2] Corantos were broadsheets of foreign news, which before this point had been produced in the Netherlands and imported to England. According to the court record, however, Archer wasn’t imprisoned for producing them. Rather, both he and Allde were charged with publishing a pamphlet entitled A briefe description of the reasons that make the declaration of the ban made against the King of Bohemia [...] of no value.[3]

A briefe description is a quarto pamphlet dealing with a single issue: the Imperial ban against the erstwhile Palatine Elector Frederick V, son-in-law of James I, who had been driven into exile following his ill-fated bid for the crown of Bohemia. James’s insistence upon seeking Frederick’s restoration by diplomatic means meant that texts dealing with the situation trod a dangerous line – or, as in the case of A briefe description, stepped blithely over it by openly criticising the Emperor.

Presumably aware that A briefe description was likely to touch a nerve, Archer and Allde didn’t put their names to it. Rather, they attributed it to ‘Arnold Meuris bookeseller at the signe of the Bible’, in The Hague.

This appears to be a reference to Aert Meuris, a prolific and wealthy printer from The Hague who, amongst other things, produced news pamphlets for the Court of the Province of Holland.[4]

In the light of this fakery, it may seem perverse to claim A briefe description as an example of international news networks in action. The pamphlet is polemical commentary rather than ‘news’, and its title page carries a barefaced lie about its provenance. However, texts like this are important when seeking to understand how foreign news functioned in England in the early 1620s.

Although it could be argued that A briefe description isn’t a ‘news’ text, exactly, it is news-adjacent in more ways than one. Mead’s postscript suggests that Archer was also producing – or at least selling – corantos, Moreover, such texts could be in themselves sources of news: A briefe description carries information about the Imperial ban as well as a polemic against it. The question of whether texts like this should make their way into, for example, statistical analyses of news printing is rather too big to tackle here. However, we’d be mistaken to dismiss texts like A briefe description when considering news publication and circulation.

The fact that Archer and Allde falsified a provenance for A briefe description is itself rather telling. The lie on the title page of A briefe description may not describe a real movement of texts between The Hague and London – but it can tell us some interesting things about how such international networks were perceived, and how canny stationers like Archer and Allde manipulated these perceptions.

Falsifying foreign imprints appears to have been a frequent practice for Allde. His imprisonment appears to have been quite short, as on 8 October 1621 he was before the court again, for having ‘latelie Imprinted diverse bookes without lycense or entrance, and being called into question for the same, hath used verie unfitting wordes and scandalous speeches of the Master and wardens, and table of Assistantes’. ‘Diverse books’ makes it clear that he was known for underhand printing on some scale; this is supported by the number of pamphlets with false foreign imprints that are associated with him. One of these was A proclamation made by the high and mighty Fredericke by the grace of God King of Bohemia (1620) – printed at Prague, according to the imprint. In 1621 he also printed two further pamphlets attributed to Meuris, both of which dealt with Dutch politics. The Stationers’ Court ordered ‘that he shall not be warned to attend anie more as a liverie man untill he shall submitt himselfe to this table’ – which he didn’t do for nearly two years.[5]

Despite the suspension of his livery membership, and the court-ordered damage inflicted upon his press, Allde continued to print pamphlets about foreign affairs – most of which have either no imprint, or a falsified foreign one. In 1622 he printed a pamphlet of Dutch news purporting to be from Amsterdam, as well as two news pamphlets claiming to have been printed in The Hague but without named printers. He even printed a translation of Ernst von Mansfeld’s Appollogie alleged to have been printed at Heidelberg – an unlikely story, given that Heidelberg was under siege by Spanish and Imperial forces.[6]

Allde was not the only stationer to engage in such practices. The printer William Stansby and the bookseller Nathaniel Butter were imprisoned for a controversial pamphlet purporting to be from The Hague: A plaine demonstration of the unlawful succession of Ferdinand the second, which argued that the Emperor was the product of an incestuous union.[7] Stansby’s excuse – that Butter persuaded him to print the book because ‘manie other treatises concerning the affaires of Forraine Princes were publiquely sold without contradicion’ – is undermined if one accepts F. S. Ferguson’s conclusion that several of these ‘other treatises’ (themselves attributed to named Dutch printers) were surreptitiously produced in the same print shop as A plaine demonstration.[8]

Why did these stationers falsify imprints? The main reason was presumably self-preservation. Publishing texts about the conflict in the Empire could bring uncomfortable and expensive punishment, as Archer and Allde found out. Naming an existing foreign printer like Meuris could give extra credibility to the deception, as long as no-one wrote to The Hague to check.

There were also sound commercial reasons for claiming that a text had been published in The Hague. Meuris was rather closer to the action than Archer – especially given that The Hague was the location of the Palatine court in exile. The Hague was also, like Amsterdam, a known centre of news publication, where corantos were produced for the English market. Allde’s false imprints testify to a sense of distance. London was a long way from the places where the events described in these texts took place. It also wasn’t central to the European news economy in the way that Amsterdam and The Hague were. News from Europe and beyond reached London later and with more difficulty.

One reader’s periphery is of course another reader’s node. News obtained from London-based booksellers and newsletter writers fed into sociable and professional networks throughout England and Scotland. It’s important to recognise how, by exploiting a known international link, Allde and Archer expressed a sense of connectedness. Their deception relied on the assumption that their readers knew that texts about continental news, in English, could and did come from Dutch printing houses.

The notion that London was at once linked to and removed from European news networks is key to understanding how news functioned in early 1620s England. These falsified imprints aren’t just examples of stationers behaving badly. They speak to a growing, but complex, sense of connection between the booksellers of London and the great flood of information passing through nodes in European news networks. When considering how the movement of news may have influenced readers’ mindsets – how they might have seen themselves and the texts they read in relation to international networks – one could do worse than examine the subterfuges of stationers.

(KR)

GABRIEL ANDRÉS (ED.): PROTO-GIORNALISMO E LETTERATURA. AVVISI A STAMPA, RELACIONES DE SUCESOS (Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2013).

Las relaciones de sucesos (avvisi a stampa, en italiano) representan el primer periodismo de la Historia. Relatos ocasionales de un acontecimiento con fines informativos, en su mayoría anónimos e impresos, las relaciones surgen en el siglo XV, con la invención de la imprenta, y perduran hasta el XX, pero se desarrollan sobre todo en el XVII y XVIII. Sin embargo, nuestro conocimiento acerca de ese primer periodismo de la Historia ha sido, durante mucho tiempo, aproximado o parcial, principalmente por la dificultad de acceder a los documentos originales, pero también por la propia naturaleza de estos documentos: impresos efímeros, baratos y de poca calidad material, considerados por muchos como géneros menores o infraliteratura.

Urge, por tanto, la recuperación y la revalorización de estos documentos antiguos, fuentes esenciales para hacer la historia del periodismo. Y ese es precisamente el principal mérito de la obra Proto-giornalismo e letteratura. Avvisi a stampa, relaciones de sucesos, que acaba de publicarse. Editada por Gabriel Andrés (Università di Cagliari), experto en la literatura del Siglo de oro, se trata de una compilación de nueve estudios (siete están escritos en español, uno en italiano y otro en catalán) que exploran el tema de los orígenes del periodismo y sus conexiones con la literatura desde una perspectiva mediterránea. Pese a su carácter colectivo, los autores de la obra, investigadores y colaboradores de la Sociedad Internacional para el Estudio de las Relaciones de Sucesos (SIERS), comparten, demuestran y ejemplifican una tesis transversal que afirma que la circulación de avisos impresos, relaciones de sucesos y otros textos afines a lo largo y ancho del Mediterráneo durante el Antiguo Régimen tuvo un alcance paneuropeo y supuso la aparición de una serie de fenómenos de naturaleza protoperiodística, literaria o paraliteraria que a menudo han sido obviados por la historiografía. O dicho de otro modo, abordan la aparición de este primer mercado de la comunicación en los albores de la Edad Moderna, incidiendo, como ya señalaba Agustín Redondo, en la plasticidad de unos documentos históricos, las relaciones, que son capaces de absorber y ser absorbidos por otros textos, de conciliar diversos géneros.

Tal y como afirma Giuseppina Ledda – otra destacada especialista en la materia – en la Presentación a esta nueva obra, “il problema del rapporto relaciones – pregiornalismo – giornalismo, richiede ancora precisazioni. Nelle relaciones, cartas, avisos, cartas de avisos… sono state individuale le prime forme del giornalismo, si è parlato di protogiornalismo. Necessario un invito alla prudenza: le relazioni circolano tra e con le varie forme del protogiornalismo. È lecito riconoscere alle relaciones de sucesos una identità di genere conferita loro dalle note caratteristiche già segnalate: editoriali, di vendita e destinazione. Credo piuttosto opportuno parlare di compresenza e di possibili interscambi con i generi affini” (p. 9).

El presente volumen se inicia con el trabajo de Henry Ettinghausen, experto en la materia que defiende el carácter internacional que caracterizaba a la transmisión de las noticias y a los medios informativos europeos desde sus orígenes. Bajo ese prisma, Ettinghausen lamenta que en Italia se haya menospreciado e ignorado el estudio de esos primeros productos preperiodísticos de la prensa, las relaciones, y argumenta que en el país transalpino, lo mismo que en España y en otros países europeos, floreció una prensa impresa casi a partir de la invención de la imprenta, llegando incluso a concluir que sería más apropiado llamar relationi a los equivalentes italianos de las relaciones de sucesos españolas, en detrimento de su denominación actual, avvisi a stampa.

Desde esa misma preocupación historiográfica por confirmar el carácter paneuropeo del primer periodismo, Carmen Espejo realiza un ejercicio de historia comparada al revisar un lugar común entre los especialistas del campo que afirma que el fenómeno del gaceterismo llega tarde a España y sólo en su modelo menos sugerente, el del periodismo oficial. A partir del ejemplo de la Gazeta de Roma, publicada en Valencia al menos en 1619, Espejo reclama que el género periodístico llegó a la Península ibérica al mismo tiempo y con las mismas fórmulas editoriales que pueden observarse en el resto de Europa.

Esta primera parte de la obra, titulada “Avvisi a stampa e relaciones de sucesos”, es la más interesante para los especialistas en el campo de la historia del periodismo. Después de los estudios más globales de Ettinghausen y Espejo, se suceden tres trabajos más concretos: dos de ellos, el de Jorge García López (Universidad de Girona) y el de Francesca Leonetti (Università G. D’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara), abordan el fenómeno de la reedición y la refundición de relaciones sobre un mismo acontecimiento, fenómeno característico entre los siglos XVII y XIX. Se trata de la batalla de Lepanto (1571), en el caso del primero, y del romance de Francisca la Cautiva, en el caso de la segunda. Completa esta sección el trabajo de Marcial Rubio Árquez (Università G. D’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara), que profundiza en la intertextualidad que se produce entre las relaciones de sucesos y la novela picaresca, localizando e indicando las relaciones que Mateo Alemán usó como fuente para contar la boda de la reina Margarita de Austria con el católico Felipe III, descrita en el Guzmán apócrifo.

En la última década y al amparo de la SIERS[1] o de ambiciosos proyectos de investigación como BIDISO[2], la producción científica en torno a las relaciones de sucesos se ha incrementado exponencialmente, sobre todo en España (Galicia, Navarra, Andalucía y Cataluña), pero también en Portugal e Italia, demostrando la potencialidad de un género que ya no es considerado marginal, sino marginado, ni infraliterario, sino paraliterario. Tras una primera fase de trabajo bibliográfico y descriptivo, basado en una ingente actividad previa de localización, catalogación y digitalización que aún perdura, han proliferado obras como la que reseñamos en estas líneas. Se trata de estudios monográficos o compilatorios que han dado paso a una investigación crítica e interpretativa de los fondos documentales hallados, desde enfoques interdisciplinares que combinan lo artístico, lo literario, lo periodístico, lo histórico, lo religioso y lo socio-antropológico.

Sin embargo, la intensa y prolífica actividad investigadora en torno a avisos y relaciones que se ha producido en el ámbito español no encuentra parangón en otros países europeos. En Italia, por ejemplo, este fenómeno sólo se ha estudiado mínimamente pese a que también existió un mercado de noticias auténtico y propio, en el que se observa una copiosa producción así como una red de traducción e intercambio de este tipo de hojas volantes. Ahí radica la otra gran aportación de esta obra, que dedica su segunda parte (“La Sardegna, relaciones e materiali affini”) a estudiar, desde un enfoque micro, el ambiente cultural de la isla italiana de Cerdeña. Y lo hace prestando especial atención a las relaciones de fiestas, a las representaciones teatrales y a los pliegos poéticos.

En el primer capítulo de esta segunda parte dedicada a Cerdeña, Gabriel Andrés se centra en documentos que se caracterizan por una triple función festiva, narrativa e informativa y por su gran extensión. La Copia de la relación sobre una fiesta teatral sarda interesa no sólo por lo que se refiere a la historia de los usos y costumbres de la aristocracia sarda del siglo XVII sino también por el hecho de que la relación sobre la fiesta es repartida y leída durante la representación teatral, pasando a formar parte de la misma fiesta. A continuación, Marta Galiñanes Gallén (Università di Sassari) parte de un caso concreto (la Historia general de la Isla y Reyno de Sardeña, de Francisco de Vico) para reivindicar el uso de las relaciones de sucesos extraordinarios como fuentes históricas siempre que se tenga en cuenta su intención propagandística y su capacidad para manipular al lector. Por su parte, María Dolores García Sánchez (Università di Cagliari) rescata un interesante pliego suelto poético de principios del siglo XVII de los fondos de la Biblioteca Universitaria de Cagliari. Obra del escritor sardo Jacinto Arnal de Bolea, se trata del único ejemplar del que se tiene noticia. En el último capítulo, Joan Armangué (Università di Cagliari) destaca el especial interés que la Colección Bonsoms de la Biblioteca de Cataluña tiene para la historiografía sarda, ya que conserva una serie de documentos impresos (pragmáticas, privilegios) relacionados con el Reino de Cerdeña, datados entre los siglos XVI y XVII.

Publicada por la editorial FrancoAngeli, la presente obra se encuadra en la Colección Metodi e prospettive. Se trata de una colección de volúmenes, monografías y misceláneas en el campo de la lingüística, la filología y la crítica literaria. Publica estudios de corte innovador e interdisciplinar, con especial atención a los aspectos culturales del proceso literario, a la hibridación y a la problemática de los géneros, así como a la edición de textos inéditos o que propongan una nueva visión crítica.

En conclusión, el principal mérito de esta obra reside en su capacidad para conservar a lo largo de sus páginas la coherencia temática, superando el obstáculo inicial de la heterogeneidad inconexa que representa su condición de miscelánea, lo cual es un acierto de su editor Gabriel Andrés. Asimismo, esta compilación de estudios constituye una aportación de gran valor en el campo de la historia del periodismo durante la Edad Moderna, especialmente en el marco de las relaciones hispano-italianas, puesto que es capaz de conjugar un enfoque micro (Cerdeña) con una visión pan-europea de los orígenes de la actividad periodística y de sus relaciones con la literatura.

(Francisco Baena, Universidad de Sevilla)

Proceedings began with a paper from Massimo Petta on printed Italian avvisi, using Milanese printers to help trace the networks of the printed newsletter and the emergence of its characteristic layout; particularly the gradual supplanting of data giving the source of the news by publishing data in the paratextual materials.  Petta discovered that the networks established by Milanese printers of newssheets came to be used by booksellers and printers for the general trade as well; and he noted that most of the networks he describes have two levels, a more circumscribed circulation of avvisi among Italian cities on the one hand, and a wider circulation, often in different forms and genres.  Subsequent discussion of a number of points raised the question of how to define an avviso, and whether its chief characteristics reside in the discourse itself or the paratextual materials (revisiting a point raised in the Antwerp meeting, as to whether single-event printed newsletters qualify as avvisi.)

Chiara Palazzo used the example of the battle of Chaldiran, in present day Iran, between the Ottomans and Persians in 1514 to elaborate the structure and function of the Venetian news network in the early 16^th century.  She demonstrated in detail the overlaying of a commercial network on a diplomatic network that provided a complex series of staging posts, suggesting at least three principle lines along which news could emerge from the Ottoman empire and the Eastern Mediterranean.  As well as fully articulating the complexity of a network which is frequently treated simply as a connection between two points – Venice and Constantinople – Palazzo also attended closely to the extent to which news of Ottoman military ventures were the subject of interpretation, wishful thinking, and downright distortion.

The first afternoon concluded with a roundtable, with each of the project’s core members discussing the mechanisms of censorship and state control in their area of geographical expertise.  Paul Arblaster, dealing with the Hapsburg Netherlands, traced the development of press laws from religiously motivated prohibitions of particular titles, authors and types of book, to systems of prepublication licensing, experiments with self-regulation by the press (Philip II ordered the printers of Antwerp to form a guild in 1557 for the purposes of regulating the trade; the same year as his wife, Mary I of England, incorporated the Stationers’ Company of London, it was pointed out.)  He also outlined the complexities of the various authorities empowered to license books in the region, pointing out that rivalries between these were exploitable by printers and booksellers.  It was also suggested that there were instances where general press laws were created to camouflage strikes strike at particular works without wishing to give the targeted work notoriety that would follow. There was considerable interest in whether this strategy might have been imitated in other parts of Europe.

André Belo added some remarks on the structures of censorship in Portugal.  He outlined a tripartite system of censorship – the crown, Inquisition, and diocesan authorities, and noted that in 1642 Portuguese gazettes were banned; they were reinstated in 1642, provided they refrained from reporting on domestic news.  Although officially barred from taking partisan positions in their reporting, the Portuguese gazettes found ways of making their editorial positions easily understood.

Carmen Espejo emphasized the extent to which Spanish news managed to circulate effectively, despite the historiographical commonplace that the chokehold of censorship by the Inquisition and the Spanish crown prevented it.  (Antonio Castillo Gomez made a similar point in a different context during the Seville workshop, pointing to the culture of libels, ballads and writing on walls that fashioned local networks of news in 17^th-century Spain, and frequently exploited or was actually occasioned by rivalry between branches of civil and religious authority.)  As elsewhere, Espejo pointed out, censorship laws were inconsistently applied and rested in the hands of multiple authorities.

Mario Infelise outlined the structures of state control of printing in the Venetian Republic – whose printers’ Guild was also set up in the 1550s, around the same time as the Antwerp and London guilds.  Unlike many other European powers, and although its system of censorship included a reader who checked books for religiously heterodox opinions, the system of imprimatur was not used; ultimate authority over the publication of printed matter resided with the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova, whose authority extended over all cultural matters.

Turning again to Northern Europe, Joad Raymond emphasized both the relative ease with which the press could be controlled in England and Wales given its concentration in a single centre, but also the ad hoc nature of much of the legislation that addressed the book trade; and pointed to Charles II’s preference for blunt over legislative instruments for regulating the world of print, as gangs of thugs were used to beat up the authors and printers of books displeasing to the crown.

The meeting resumed the following morning at the Venetian State Archives, whose astonishing collection is housed in a cluster of three adjoining convents and whose shelves contain over 70 kilometres of documents.  A guided tour of these was followed by a demonstration of the scope, content, and organization of the archive by Mario Infelise.  Bound volumes of weekly dispatches from ambassadors stationed all over Europe were shown, along with the weekly abstracts of information received by the senate that was sent back to the Republic’s agents, texts of avvisi gathering information from Venice for dispatch to other European centres, and a unique example of the simplified avvisi printed to hang on shop walls and rafters – known in French as lardons. Infelise also showed the state documentation of the regulation of printing in Venice, which from the mid-16^th century provides a fairly complete picture, including the first documented printing privilege in Venice (from 1459) and the registers of the guild.

After lunch Sheila Barker gave a presentation on the production of Roman avvisi, and their procurement by the Medici Grand Dukes of Florence, based on the astonishing collection of 200,000 examples in the Medici Archive.  Barker drew attention to the urgency with which news left Rome, the systems of checking and comparing multiple avvisi used by Cosimo de Medici and his secretaries to establish the reliability of the news they received, and pointed to the Medici interest in how Florentine affairs were reported, the use of avvisi as a sort of market report on the bribery that was an essential part of Roman religious and political life and which formed an important part of the political news of the Italian peninsula, and the development of news as a species of entertainment  (pointing in particular to the lavishly detailed descriptions of plays and processions).

Lodovica Braida then gave a paper on printed letter collections, demonstrating how their origins as style manuals did not preclude their use as vehicles for current political information and for the popular dissemination of heterodox religious views in the guise of manuals of fine style.  Braida also pointed out that the information or views contained could acquire fresh relevance in subsequent editions, noting in particular the omission of controversial materials in editions of Paolo Manutio’s (the son of the great Venetian typographer) collection of Lettere Volgari around the time of the Council of Trent.

Joad Raymond’s paper offered some reflections on how to theorise news networks and posed a challenge to the network, arguing that the national and nationalistic biases of the historiographies of news communication established in the 19th and early 20^th centuries have not been effectively broken down, either by transnational case studies or by the achievements in recent bibliographical scholarship and the histories of reading and of the book.  Raymond proposed that it might be possible to conceptualise the history of news communication through the optic of social network theory, which provides mathematical models for understanding complex networks as self-organising rather than random systems.

The workshop resumed and concluded the following day with Laura Carnelos’s paper on the market for cheap print in 16^th- and 17^th-century Venice, detailing the sites of exchange, the classification of printed matter in the Venetian book trade, the role of itinerant distributors, and practices for regulating it.  Among many interesting points that came up in discussion, it was noted that charlatans and mountebanks traded under official licence, protecting one aspect of their livelihood (as traders in cheap printed matter) in order to better restrain another (as hawkers of worthless remedies.)

Thanks are due to everyone who attended, as well as all the contributors, to Mario Infelise and the Universita Ca’ Foscari in particular for their work in organizing and hosting the event, and, as always, to the Leverhulme Trust for funding it.  The next News Networks event will be the London Symposium, News and the shape of Europe, at Queen Mary from 26-28 July: watch this space, and the website (http://newscom.english.qmul.ac.uk) for more details.

(NM)

El V Seminario de la red “News Networks in Early Modern Europe” se celebró en una de las sedes de la universidad veneciana Ca’Foscari, entre los días 7 y 9 de marzo de 2013. Mario Infelise, miembro de la red y profesor en la Ca’Foscari, acogió al grupo de ponentes e invitados  con la cortesía que es habitual en él.

Las sesiones del seminario dieron comienzo el día 7 de marzo a las 13:00 con la intervención de Massimo Petta (Università di Milano), “Obscure printers, unexpected connections: the role of C17th Milanese printers in early modern news networks”. Petta partió del argumento de que los primeros impresos noticieros basaron su credibilidad en la reputación del informante, pero, a medida que el mercado de los avisos se hacía más extenso, este criterio fue sustituido por la estandarización: es decir, el reconocimiento por parte del público de las marcas propias del género, tanto en el paratexto como en el texto. Algunos impresores de avisos en la Italia del XVI, como Antonio Blado, dieron su forma definitiva al género. La presentación de los avisos aparece entonces estandarizada hacia 1570.

En la siguiente sesión, Chiara Palazzo (Università Ca’Foscari, Venecia), disertó sobre el tema “The Venetian News Networks at the beginning of XVIth Century: the Battle of Cialdiran (august 23rd, 1514)”.  Tomando como ejemplo la Batalla de Cialdaran en la que se enfrentaron turcos y persas, Palazzo estudia las rutas por las que la información sobre el devenir de la batalla – favorable a los turcos – llegó a Italia. La vía principal parte de Constantinopla y llega por tierra a Italia a través de Ragusa y Venecia; otra ruta, por mar, rodea la península helénica y llega a Venecia; otra más, por mar y tierra, parte desde Constantinopla a Corfú y de ahí a Otranto, Nápoles y Venecia. Aunque el origen de la mayor parte de esta información era diplomático – el representante veneciano en Constantinopla enviaba un informe a la metrópolis cada quincena -, la información procedente de fuentes comerciales confluía con esta primera y a veces incluso la precedía. El caso de Chialdaran es especialmente significativo porque el resultado de la batalla fue contrario a los intereses venecianos y europeos: la información circuló así con una calculada lentitud, y las interpretaciones de los avisos abundaban en el desmentido de la victoria turca. A pesar de ello, afirmó Palazzo, los informes eran precisos y veraces.

En la tarde de este primer día del seminario se celebró la mesa redonda “Censorship and state control in Early Modern Europe”. Participaron en ella los miembros permanentes de la red Joad Raymond, Paul Arblaster, André Belo, Mario Infelise y Carmen Espejo. Las intervenciones pusieron de manifiesto que las instituciones y procedimientos de la censura fueron muy similares en todo el continente, mientras que Inglaterra supone una notable excepción gracias a la presencia de una institución de carácter gremial como la Stationers’ Company. Por otro lado, se puso de manifiesto que, en todos los territorios analizados, la efectividad de la censura era tan sólo relativa, en tanto que actuó a menudo de manera inconsecuente o caprichosa. Este último argumento sirvió a Raymond para apuntar que en buena medida la eficacia se obtuvo, paradójicamente, gracias a la inseguridad y la tendencia a la autocensura que esta actuación errática provocaba en impresores y autores.

En la mañana del día 8 de marzo el grupo se reunió en el Archivo di Stato de Venecia. Tras una visita guiada a los impresionantes fondos del archivo, Mario Infelise (Università Ca’Foscari) ofreció una muestra de las colecciones de avisos manuscritos e impresos, además de otros documentos fundamentales para la comprensión de la historia del primer periodismo, que se encuentran conservados en el Archivo. Infelise explicó que el sistema político y diplomático de la República de Venecia obligaba a sus representantes en otros territorios a enviar relaciones de avisos periódicos – quincenales – al Senado de la república. Estas relaciones o despachos eran leídos y discutidos en voz alta en el Senado, y un sumario de todos los avisos recibidos se copiaba y enviaba al cuerpo diplomático también periódicamente.

La tarde de esta misma jornada dio inicio con el trabajo presentado por Sheila Barker (The Medici Archive Project, Florencia), “The circunstances of avviso production in early C-17th Rome”. Barker analizó el circuito que permitió a los Medici del XVI florentino recibir una considerable cantidad de avisos, generalmente procedentes de Venecia incluso cuando referían noticias de localidades cercanas a Florencia como Roma o Lucca. Aún así, los Medici parecen haber desconfiado de la veracidad de estos avisos, de manera que multiplicaban las fuentes desde las que obtenían la información para poder contrastar las noticias.

En su intervención titulada “Religious dissent, polítical information and historical speculation in 16th century’s epistolary collection”, Lodovica Braida (Università degli Studi di Milano) abordó la importante edición de colecciones de cartas que se dio en la Italia del Quinientos. Braida demostró cómo algunas de estas colecciones se utilizaron para difundir subrepticiamente nociones religiosas o políticas sobre las que pesaba una prohibición de la censura.

La sesión de tarde concluyó con la presentación de Joad Raymond (Queen Mary University of London), “News networks: putting the news and networks back in”. En ella recorrió la evolución de la historiografía más contemporánea para señalar aquellas aportaciones que explican el cambio del paradigma metodológico con el que se estudia la historia del periodismo de la Edad Moderna en las dos últimas décadas: desde la nueva bibliografía material a la historia de la lectura, la historia social o incluso la historia oral, entre otras. Sin embargo, según Raymond, persiste la incapacidad para dibujar un modelo de red que explique la diseminación de las noticias en la Europa de la primera Edad Moderna. En su intervención propuso un modelo de red de inspiración matemática que permitiría distinguir los nudos centrales de los periféricos, independiente de su posición geográfica.

Finalmente, el día 9 se cerró el seminario con la intervención de Laura Carnelos (Università Ca’Foscari), titulada “The book network: selling songs and reports in 17th-18th century Venice”. En su trabajo Carnelos desveló las redes de gazeteros y “charlatanes” que se repartían el mercado de la prensa popular en Venecia, prestando especial atención a las formas y los modos con los que llevaban a cabo sus actuaciones y a la legislación que intentó, casi siempre sin éxito, controlar estas prácticas.

(CE)

Sheila Barker considers a question from the audience……and the project director delivers his paper.Sheila Barker, Massimo Petta, Laura Carnelos and Chiara Palazzo (l-r) attend to the subsequent discussion.Laura Carnelos delivers a paper on the trade in cheap print in early modern Venice.Scholarly collaboration over dinner……and just to prove we were in Venice.

The deadline for abstracts for News Networks’ summer conference is coming up quickly – February 28th next week. Send your proposals (250 words), for papers of 20 minutes duration, to n.j.moxham@qmul.ac.uk; and follow the blog for updates.

NM

News Networks is approaching its fifth workshop, to be held at the Universita Ca’ Foscari in Venice in six weeks time.  This event will be our last research workshop before the project conference, News and the Shape of Europe 1500-1750 (to be held at Queen Mary, University of London this summer from 26-28 July – deadline for abstracts is the 28^th of February, so get submitting!).  Confirmed speakers at this event include the project director, Joad Raymond (QMUL), as well as Mario Infelise (our host on this occasion), Lodovica Braida (University of Milan), Sheila Barker (Medici Archive Project), Laura Carnelos, Chiara Palazzo, and Massimo Petta.

The meeting will have a strong regional focus; as our previous two meetings have examined the Germanies and the Iberian peninsula, this event will focus on Italy, including papers on Venetian, Roman and Florentine networks of news-gathering and distribution.  The other strand of the workshop will be a comparative focus on the role of censorship and state control in the production and circulation of news throughout Europe, from the self-regulation of the Stationer’s Company in London to the intensive state interference in France (which practically established the newspaper as an organ of state, and from which even literary journalism was not immune – see last week’s blog on the Journal des Sçavans.)  The various modes and intensities of censorship, the criteria according to which they were applied, and the strategies used for getting around them are of critical importance to understanding the structure and function of early modern news networks.  Who had the task of censoring the news? What kinds of news were especially prone to censorship? And what were its aims (that is, was it principally concerned to suppress news at home, or abroad?) The Italian focus of the meeting is particularly apposite for these questions, at once because of the continuing importance of the manuscript newsletter in Italy, the many and competing jurisdictions on the peninsula, and the prominence given to news from Rome and Venice in news in other European languages.   More news of the event will be posted here in due course; and suggestions for further topics and themes for discussion are of course always welcome!

The remark proved prescient – the Journal ran for barely three months before its repeated endorsements of gallican positions led to its being shut down by the government following a complaint from the papal legate.  It was revived in 1666, when it appeared weekly; thereafter its periodicity was extremely erratic for most of the next ten years, varying from a handful of issues per year up to 1674, to an average of fortnightly or better in the late 1670s and early 1680s.  Oldenburg had problems of his own to face – wars on the continent that disrupted his correspondence, plague, fire, and a spell of incarceration – but by and large he kept the Transactions up to its intended monthly periodicity (with exceptions usually made for July and August, or August and September, when the Royal Society took its annual recess.)

Neither was exactly a news periodical, but it’s worth noting that news and the structures of news discourse had an important influence on both – something that has been partly forgotten in the subsequent emphasis on the ways in which they represented something new.  Moray’s renaming, for instance, is suggestive; whether intentionally or by Freudian slip, “gazette” associates the new publication with Théophraste Renaudot’s Gazette de France.  The implication is that weekly periodicity gives rise to expectations of a certain kind of discourse (and Moray knew that the Journal was intended to appear more often than monthly, since his reference to Oldenburg’s nascent Transactions acknowledges that they will ‘only’ appear once a month).  Like the Gazette, the Journal was under the direct patronage of the government; it was the subject of a privilege, intended to grant its author a monopoly; and it touched often on political or theological matters.    The Transactions, for its part, presented surprisingly little that would now be recognizable as scientific research papers.  Oldenburg, occasionally fêted as the world’s first scientific editor, might be more aptly remembered as the world’s first scientific journalist, pulling together from his role as Secretary to the Royal Society and the vast correspondence he kept up across Europe a snapshot of contemporary goings-on in natural philosophy.  The letter-extracts, second-hand reports, and promotional extracts of books in which Oldenburg had a financial stake as editor or translator (notably by Robert Boyle) represent a very large proportion of the whole of the early journal, and formally presented research rather less than is sometimes thought.

The picture above shows the 27^th of June 1672 issue of the Journal. Bouhéreau’s note remarks on the fact that he’s been informed, almost two years after the fact, that the issue that was supposed to come between this and the next extant issue of July 25^th “is not to be found, the author not wishing it to be printed”.[1]  I’d like to think that Bouhéreau made this note in 1674 when he got Abraham Tessereau’s letter, because it would speak well of his bibliographical curiosity some time before he became keeper of Marsh’s Library.  Bouhéreau knew there was a missing issue not because of an unexplained gap in the periodicity of the Journal­ – it was too erratic for that, and individual issues weren’t numbered  – but because there is a gap in the pagination.  An issue was earmarked for that gap, and perhaps even printed, but was withdrawn or suppressed before it could reach the public, and at any rate does not survive.  (The rest of the visible text is a book review of a treatise on the airs, waters, soils and places of England, as well as of the habits and temperaments of the English, printed in England but written in Latin; this section is a translation of the review section of the Philosophical Transactions for March of the same year.)  The reason for the non-appearance of this issue is not clear – Bouhéreau’s note indicates that it was the will of the publisher, although in a French context that could as easily indicate the interference of Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief minister, as a decision by Jean Gallois, who was the principal author of the Journal in the 1670s.

Bouhéreau is, or ought to be, a hero to librarians everywhere; a dedicated bibliophile, a skilled cataloguer, on the surviving evidence, and a man of action.  Exiled from his hometown of La Rochelle for his Protestantism, he successfully smuggled his books out of the country into England and, eventually, Ireland, where they were eventually donated to Marsh’s. (In this he had the help of the English ambassador).  He followed the books soon after; lest anyone think his priorities were a little off, he also arranged the escape of his family, and subsequently, it’s reported, returned to France to rescue his youngest son, whom he hadn’t managed to smuggle out in the initial attempt.[2]

Reblogged from Early Modern News Networks:

News Networks in Early Modern Europe is very pleased to announce an international, interdisciplinary conference, to take place at Queen Mary, University of London in July 2013 on the theme 'News and the Shape of Europe, 1500-1750'.  The call for papers is available to download below:

News and The Shape of Europe CFP

For more information about what should be a very exciting event, or to submit a paper proposal, please write to 

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