News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe

Over the past decade, newspaper history has taken a cultural turn: a familiar political bibliographical narrative, which had been the model for newspaper history since about 1860, has been rescripted through a range of new multi-disciplinary interests shared in particular with the history of political thought and the history of books and of reading. A new narrative of the early history of news and the media is emerging, and it raises questions which will be central to future histories of the political and literary culture of early-modern Britain. What is the relationship between the circulation of news in Britain and communication networks elsewhere in Europe? Was the British development of the media unique? What are the specific rhetorical properties of news-communication in 17th century Britain? What was the relationship between commerce and politics? How do local exchanges of news relate to national practices and institutions? This volume offers a series of case studies exemplifying the new newspaper history, and seeks to establish an agenda for answering some of these questions. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Media History.