Chapter One. Literary Cultures And Public Opinion In The Early Modern Low Countries

‘The Sharpness of a Smooth Tongue’. Literary Texts and the Formation of Public Opinion in the Early Modern NetherlandsThe Low Countries hardly play any role in international debates about the history of the formation of public opinion in early modern Europe. In the wake of Jürgen Habermas, historians have focused in particular on late seventeenthand eighteenth-century England and France. Scholars have criticised the notion that it was during the eighteenth century that the formation of free public opinion came into existence due to a combination of the periodical press, its critical role and a national readership. Nevertheless, the period before 1700 is hardly referred to at all during discussions about the role of public opinion. During that time a permanent, structured public openness did not exist. However, in the early modern Low Countries many socio-cultural and institutional conditions seem to be present which made the formation of critical public opinion among the population possible. The literary culture of these regions offers an important research subject for studies into the formation of public opinion.

List of Illustrations Preface, Jan Bloemendal, Arjan van Dixhoorn and Elsa Strietman 1. Literary Cultures and Public Opinion in the Early Modern Low Countries, Jan Bloemendal and Arjan van Dixhoorn 2. 'You serve me well': Representations of Gossip, Newsmongering and Public Opinion in the Plays of Cornelis Everaert, Samuel Mareel 3. 'Please Do Not Mind the Crudeness of its Weave': Literature, Gender and the Polemic Authority of Anna Bijns, Judith Kessler 4. The Morality of Hypocrisy: Gnapheus's Latin Play Hypocrisis and the Lutheran Reformation, Verena Demoed 5. Playing to the Public, Playing with Opinion: Latin and Vernacular Dutch History Drama by Heinsius and Duym, Juliette Groenland 6. Hugo Grotius in Praise of Jacobus Arminius: Arminian Readers of an Epicedium in the Dutch Republic and England, Moniek van Oosterhout 7. Manuscript Pamphlets and Made-Up Performances: New Sources and Challenges in the Study of Public Opinion, Nelleke Moser 8. 'The Cry of the Royal Blood': Revenge Tragedy and the Stuart Cause in the Dutch Republic, 1649-1660, Helmer Helmers 9. 'A Vile and Scandalous Ditty': Popular Song and Public Opinion in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Village Conflict, Joke Spaans 10. Early Modern Literary Cultures and Public Opinion: An Epilogue in the Form of a Discussion, Jan Bloemendal and Arjan van Dixhoorn Bibliography About the authors Index of Names and Subjects

This chapter shows how an early modern theatre society facilitated forms of public debate and the formation of public opinion which Habermas believed to have been absent at the time for lack of proper media and of an engaged and informed public. Using the case of Amsterdam in the 1530s it argues that a sophisticated interplay of theatrical, visual, oral, manuscript and printed media increased public debate, and helped create an interregional movement and the formation of its leadership. Theatrical means were used by various layers of society to create maximum publicity effects. Finally, the chapter argues that, if societies can be characterized by their dominant communication systems, then, given the example of Amsterdam and many other places in and outside the Low Countries, early modern urban society can be termed a theatre society. Keywords:Amsterdam; early modern theatre society; Low Countries; public debate; public opinion

Archduke Philip the Handsome promulgated a new constitution for the County of Zeeland (Keure van Zeelandt in Dutch).1 In Antwerp Govaert Bac later printed the text. It was the first time that the central authorities of the Low Countries resorted to printing to disseminate its official acts. This case, and in particular the links between the Antwerp printer Govaert Bac and the Burgundian court in Brussels, provide the starting point for a broader study, exploring the relationship between the community of printers and the central government in the early modern Low Countries. This complex relationship has not yet been the subject of a detailed study. Until now, only the relationship between printers and local, provincial or religious authorities have attracted the attention of scholars. Investigations were notably conducted on the French-speaking part of the Low Countries and Antwerp.

From Café Culture to Tweets

Using a few texts produced in Dutch in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries as key witnesses, this essay argues that the performative literary culture of the Dutch rhetoricians was an epistemic culture of a particular kind. Rhetoricians established their literary culture as the core of a culture of consten (i.e. a culture of the liberal arts). Consten‐culture, this essay argues, was a culture of personal virtue, and the primary fruits of exercising the arts were considered as spiritual (i.e. in the human mind); material results (i.e. creating external content or material effects) would be secondary. Material results in the world of practice were believed to follow the sharpening of wits and the shaping of personal cunning (in the early modern sense of the readiness and shrewdness needed in action). Using literary exercises for spiritual effect, the chambers of rhetoric became the institutionalised expression of the first truly philosophical school in the Dutch vernacular, until their pedagogical ideals were undermined fundamentally, and in the course of the seventeenth century, a new knowledge culture took shape.

With the development of information technology, the Internet has become an important channel of public opinion for expressing public interests, emotion, and ideas. Public emergency usually spreads via network. Due to the temporal and spatial flexibility and the information amplification of network, the opinions from different regions and background are easy to be represented as network public opinion, and have important impact on social and economic life. Thus, studying the formation mechanism of network public opinion has important theoretical and practical significance. Taking the formation process of network public opinion under emergencies as the research object, this paper first identifies the key factors influencing the formation of network public opinion, namely the internal characteristics (include individual education level, individual stubbornness, individual initial opinion, and so on) and external information of individuals (include external information intensity). Second, information intensity is introduced to describe the influence of external information feature on the formation of network public opinion. Individual education level, individual stubbornness, and individual initial opinion are analyzed to describe the influence of individual internal factors on the formation, and then its model is constructed. Through the simulation experiments, this paper analyzes the influence of external information intensity, individual education level, individual stubbornness, individual initial opinion, and other factors on the formation of network public opinion. The simulation results show that: (1) the greater intensity of public emergency reporting causes the easier formation of network public opinion; (2) the higher individual education level leads to the shorter time for completing the final formation and stable state of online public opinions, and after the formation of online public opinions, the opinion of the event is mainly neutral; (3) the greater individual's stubbornness makes the shorter formation time of online public opinion. When online public opinion reaches a stable state, the neutral opinion group dominates and firmly controls the development trend of public opinion; (4) the difference of opinions among individuals is the most important factor affecting the formation of network public opinion. Finally, the rationality and validity of the proposed model are verified by a real case. Compared with previous studies on the formation mechanism of network public opinion, this paper divides the formation process of network public opinion into three stages: individual information perception, individual decision making, and individual opinion transmission. Meanwhile, the influence of individual internal factors and external information characteristics on the formation process of network public opinion is also considered.

Previous studies of radical thinkers have brought us few examples of female radicals from the Low Countries, even if the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was a hub for radical thought which offered a relatively female-friendly climate. In this article, we explore how new perspectives and modes of analysis, better adjusted to the restrictions and opportunities women experienced, make women’s radical thought visible. By doing so, we aim to present a more balanced perspective on what might count as female radical thought in the early modern Low Countries (1500–1800). Starting from the notion of “agency,” we analyze the life, work and relations of three Dutch authors, as well as representations of female radicalism in two literary works, in order to rebalance the notion of radicalism in a woman’s world. Anna Bijns, Meynarda Verboom and Margaretha van Dijk were not radically disruptive in the sense of operating completely outside of male-dominated domains. Instead, they gained agency by negotiating their position in patriarchal knowledge systems and by bending conventions within male-dominated networks so that their voices could be heard. To understand these voices, it is necessary to disconnect “being radical” from “the amount of disruption caused” by female agency.

Citizen participation is an essential component of modern democratic public administration. However, it is not provided automatically but requires efforts from both public authorities and citizens themselves. The formation of public opinion on the need for citizen participation contributes to the unification of these efforts on both sides. In the context of the development of the information society, public opinion can and should be formed with Web 2.0 tools and technologies, primarily social media, which have a significant impact on the formation of public opinion in modern societies. The purpose of this article is to explore the possibility of forming public opinion on the need to increase citizen participation using social advertising on social media as a Web 2.0 tool. To achieve this, three research tasks were solved: to determine the essential features of public opinion; to consider the features of analysis and formation of public opinion; to consider the use of social advertising as a Web 2.0 tool for forming public opinion. A separate section of the article is devoted to each of the tasks. Based on the results of the study, several conclusions are drawn. The authors propose a mechanism for shaping public opinion on the need to increase the level of citizen participation, which includes the following components: identification of social groups for further interaction; monitoring of the social mood of these groups; tracking and analysis of social information targeted at these groups; studying public opinion rooted in certain social groups through establishing communication with them; analysis of public opinion in terms of its contribution to increasing the level of citizen participation; application of Web 2.0 tools to identify and analyse public opinion.

The occurrence of popular social events causes fluctuations and changes of public emotions, while the rapid development of online social platforms and networks has made individual interactions more intense and further escalated public emotions into public opinion. However, there is a lack of consideration of individual emotions in the current research on online public opinion. Based on this, this paper firstly expounds the quantitative representation of attitude and emotion, analyzes the formation and propagation process of online public opinion by combining individual’s expression willingness, individual’s expression ability, attitude perception value, attitude change probability and other factors, and constructs a network public opinion propagation model that takes individual emotion into consideration. Finally, the main factors affecting the formation and propagation of network public opinion are discussed through simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that: (1) fear is conducive to the formation of online public opinion, but the speed is relatively slow; sadness is not conducive to the formation, but once enough people participate in the exchange of views, the formation of online public opinion will be faster; (2) the influence of online public opinion on individual emotions expands with the increase of the number of individual interactions; (3) different network structures impact differently on the propagation of public opinion. Among them, BA (BA network is a scale-free network model proposed by Barabasi and Albert in order to explain the generation mechanism of power law, BA model has two characteristics: growth and priority connection mechanism) and ER (ER network is a network with random connectivity proposed by Erdös-Renyi) random networks can promote the propagation of online public opinion, which is prone to “one-sided” online public opinion. WS small-world networks (proposed by Watts and Strogatz. It is a kind of network with short average path length and high clustering coefficient) and fully-connected networks have an inhibitory effect on the spread of online public opinion, easily maintaining the multi-dimensional nature of online public opinion.

With the rapid development of the Internet, the speed with which information can be updated and propagated has accelerated, resulting in wide variations in public opinion. Usually, after the occurrence of some newsworthy event, discussion topics are generated in networks that influence the formation of initial public opinion. After a period of propagation, some of these topics are further derived into new subtopics, which intertwine with the initial public opinion to form a multidimensional public opinion. This paper is concerned with the formation process of multi-dimensional public opinion in the context of derived topics. Firstly, the initial public opinion variation mechanism is introduced to reveal the formation process of derived subtopics, then Brownian motion is used to determine the subtopic propagation parameters and their propagation is studied based on complex network dynamics according to the principle of evolution. The formula of basic reproductive number is introduced to determine whether derived subtopics can form derived public opinion, thereby revealing the whole process of multi-dimensional public opinion formation. Secondly, through simulation experiments, the influences of various factors, such as the degree of information alienation, environmental forces, topic correlation coefficients, the amount of information contained in subtopics, and network topology on the formation of multi-dimensional public opinion are studied. The simulation results show that: (1) Environmental forces and the amount of information contained in subtopics are key factors affecting the formation of multi-dimensional public opinion. Among them, environmental forces have a greater impact on the number of subtopics, and the amount of information contained in subtopics determines whether the subtopic can be the key factor that forms the derived public opinion. (2) Only when the degree of information alienation reaches a certain level, will derived subtopics emerge. At the same time, the degree of information alienation has a greater impact on the number of derived subtopics, but it has a small impact on the dimensions of the final public opinion. (3) The network topology does not have much impact on the number of derived subtopics but has a greater impact on the number of individuals participating in the discussion of subtopics. The multidimensional public opinion dimension formed by the network topology with a high aggregation coefficient and small average path length is higher. Finally, a practical case verifies the rationality and effectiveness of the model proposed in this paper.

Translation was a key educational tool in French schools in the early modern Low Countries, where Dutch-speaking children of merchants learned the international language of commerce. It is well known that, by using dictionaries, vocabulary books, conversation manuals, and bilingual literary works on fictional or biblical characters, boys and girls expanded their knowledge of French vocabulary and grammar. This contribution argues that such translation practices, which were omnipresent in these schools, had a much broader educational value. Next to the basic oral and written expression required for commercial transactions, the bilingual language manuals used in this environment also promised to teach their students the art of eloquence, grace, and style. This not only concerns the French target language, but also the mother tongue, which benefits from the growing plurilingualism of the students. Furthermore, other innovative forms of translation, not from one language into another, but from one medium into another, were applied in the French schools in Antwerp and elsewhere. Through these multimodal exercises, replacing text with image, young men and women practised linguistic creativity, wit, and visual literacy. Focusing on these multilingual and multimodal pedagogical forms, this chapter sheds light on the full potential of translation in the classroom.

Social media platforms have become a major tool for information dissemination, political communication, and political civic discussion nowadays. However, the prompt transmission of fake news and misinformation on Facebook has raised severe concerns about public trust and opinion formation. This study examines the proliferation of fake news on Facebook and its impact on individuals' trust levels and perception in Punjab, Pakistan. By employing Agenda-Setting Theory and the Two-Step Flow Model of Communication, the research conceptualizes misinformation as a mediated influence that shapes the prominence of an issue and public attitude through opinion leaders and AI-driven visibility. A quantitative research design was employed using a random sampling survey administered to 100 respondents, including faculty and administrative staff members and students of the University of Gujrat (Hafiz Hayat Campus), and individuals from different educational backgrounds from different areas of Punjab, Pakistan. The study further integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based verification of content/news to cross-check and identify patterns in misinformation dissemination, thereby linking advanced technological intervention with Communication Theory. The findings of this research study reveal a significant relationship among exposure to fake news on Facebook, changes in opinion formation, and reduced trust. The study enriches the current body of literature on social media, Public Opinion, Misinformation, Agenda-Setting, and Digital Trust in developing countries.

The research deals with the characteristics of the formation of public opinion during armed conflicts. It aims to study and analyze the role played by the media in the formation of public opinion during conflicts. The purpose of this research is to provide a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between the media and public opinion in the context of issues of armed conflict. The research problem is the challenges facing the formation of an objective and conscious public opinion during armed conflicts, given the growing influence of disinformation, propaganda, and censorship on the media. The research seeks to understand the main characteristics of the formation of public opinion during armed conflicts, the media strategies used to control public opinion during armed conflicts, and how the media affects public perceptions and attitudes towards the parties to the conflict.The research reached several main conclusions, most notably: the Western media played a negative role in misleading the public, by distorting the image of Russia and the Palestinians in front of international public opinion. CNN and the BBC have employed biased and subjective news frames while covering armed conflicts to win public opinion trends in favor of Israel and Ukraine. The Russia Today channel played a prominent role in forming an objective public opinion on the direction of the conflict in Gaza and the military operation in Ukraine.

Information and communication technology has helped to build communication between peoples of all different civilizations, bypassing the political, geographical, and cultural isolation that most human societies lived in. The online newspapers have played an effective role in providing people with a lot of information, attitudes and directions, contributing to this informing awareness and preparing it to be more able to influence and persuade others, And to witness a dynamic movement of development As a result of his transformation to text, visual and auditory media. Also helped to activate participation to fulfil the desire of each common category of interests, and it affected the interaction and the formation of public opinion. Nowadays online newspapers are among the means that play an important role in raising young people and giving them different habits and behaviors as a tool for social change and development since It provides them with opportunities to benefit from the new activities available to them to interact with other people, And therefore It reflects on forming a public opinion towards a social issue or phenomenon that is important to society, forms this point of view. This study came to know the effect of online newspapers on forming public opinion among high school students. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of online newspapers on forming public opinion among high school students and the nature of the connection of high school students with the online newspapers, and how much benefit do they gain from this connection as well as know their usage rates, and reveal the students trust toward what online newspaper will publish. This study used Descriptive research; the researcher relied on the survey method, for the research tool the researcher designed a questionnaire form to survey students’ opinions, collect facts and information, and then analyse them. This study consists of three chapters: In the first chapter, we explained the methodology of the study; the second chapter is a literature review. The third chapter is the Field side of the study. Summarize the most prominent conclusions the study found are the following: The results of the study indicated that the use of the mobile device came first with 73.4%, while the use of the computer with 25% came in second place. The researcher believes that this is due to the availability of internet connection, and the time allocated for browsing inside and outside the high school campus, also it provides adequate privacy in the browsing process. While those reasons are not available in the use of computers, this on the one hand, and the other hand, clarified the youth’s addiction to mobile use significantly. And this needs more research and investigation. The results of the study show that a high percentage (63.3%) of the respondents believed positively about what was published by political party’s online newspapers; this confirms the influence and presence of political party’s among young people. The use of high school students for online newspapers for several reasons and motivated utilitarian, this is one of the most important factors influencing the formation of public opinion trends among high school students. The study proved the validity of the Alternative charging, that there is a statistically significant correlation between the demographic variables of high school students and the impact of online newspapers on forming their public opinion.
 In light of the findings of the study, the researcher recommended several recommendations and suggestions as follows: Enriching the scientific and academic effort by conducting sequential studies on the impact of online newspapers in general, it includes the various segments of society this is due to its role and importance in shaping public opinion in the Kurdistan Region. Spreading awareness among young people about the role of online newspapers and their impact on developing their personalities and guiding them to make optimal use of online newspapers.