The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

Auteur

Joad Raymond is a writer and historian of early modern Europe who has taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia and Queen Mary University of London. His previous books include Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (2003), The Invention of the Newspaper (2005), Milton's Angels (2010) and, as editor, Making the News (1993), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (2011), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (2016) and The Complete Works of John Milton (2025).

Texte du rabat

An epic history of the birth of news in Europe

News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel.

This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language.

Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news - of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna - spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.