The Birth of News: communication, credibility & community in early-modern Europe

From around 1400, European merchants and diplomats collaborated to improve ways of communicating news and establishing its reliability. Supported by couriers and the innovation of national and international postal services, they formed a network, a complex web of information, long before the first newspapers were printed in 1605.

For the first time in history you could not only hope for, but expect to hear, news from other places. Knowledge that news would come brought with it a new sense of timeliness and a new sense of community, mapped by the locations from which news regularly arrived. 

This gave people a sense of belonging to a place and furthermore an understanding of their connectedness to other people; their sense of where they stood in the world shifted and grew.

This talk will look at how people wrote news stories, packaged them and sent them, how they dealt with the dangers of false news and how they forged a community that gave a shape to modern Europe.

Joad Raymond Wren is a writer of history and fiction. His latest works include an edition of Milton’s Latin Defences, for Oxford’s The Complete Works of John Milton and The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early-Modern Europe, published by Penguin books. For more information see Joad’s website here.