The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

Joad Raymond Wren

ISBN 10: 0241188539 / ISBN 13: 9780241188538

Editore: Allen Lane, 2025

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe
• Editore: Allen Lane
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0241188539
• ISBN 13: 9780241188538
• Rilegatura: Rilegato
• Condizione: New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book'
Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement

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.