The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

To prevent the sermon becoming an undignified scrum, senior clerics would negotiate their arrival in advance. This was the case with the great master of the indulgence campaign, Raymond Peraudi, whose appearances were carefully orchestrated in a flurry of printed pamphlets.65 So at this level a sermon was always news, and as often as not it was pre

If we examine the management of opinion in one particularly important jurisdiction – the great imperial city of Augsburg – it is striking how often these interventions were prompted not by print but by seditious singing. In 1553 a bookseller got into trouble when he passed around a tavern a song mocking Charles V's recent humiliation at the siege o

This is the one part of the early modern news world that has no clear equivalent today. In the Europe of the sixteenth century, however, singing played an important role in mediating news events to a largely illiterate public. The news singers, sometimes blind and often accompanied by children, would sing out their wares, then offer printed version

In the years around 1590 the Italian city of Lucca was looking to find a new source of confidential information in Rome.27 A correspondent there recommended that they employ Giovanni Poli: he was said to be far and away the best, and that there was not a single Italian ruler who did not have him under contract. Poli was also a careful man, both sav

Questions of this sort were particularly pertinent for the traditional clients of news in medieval society: Europe's rulers and merchants. They might study pamphlets to take the temperature of public debate, but they needed their own sources of news for more precise intelligence. For those in positions of power, the confidential despatch remained t

The odd mishap apart, the Roman novellanti were happy to cultivate a reputation for being able to penetrate the most secret counsels of this city of schemes. A newly appointed aide to the court of one cardinal was strictly enjoined to have no contact with the news writers. They could, he was warned, ‘take the egg out of a chicken's body, let along

In the sixteenth century this yearning for swift and reliable information also led to the establishment of the first private news offices, dealing in confidential news on a subscription basis. These news agencies, with their commercially distributed manuscript news-sheets, are by far the least known of the communication media of the period. But the

as time went by, and the web of negotiation between contesting powers became more intricate, the need for informed assessment of the mood, strength and true intentions of potential allies became ever more acute. Ambassadors were instructed to write home on a regular basis. The art of diplomacy had spawned a whole new medium: political commentary. T

It is always possible in retrospect to isolate nuggets of truth in a blizzard of contradictory intelligence reports, and marvel that they were not acted upon. At the time it is never so obvious. The English government already possessed by 1586 an exact logistical plan of the proposed Spanish invasion of England. But even as the Armada prepared to s