:Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney's Female Characters

Abstract

Brendan Dooley (ed.), The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe, Farnham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2010, pp. xiv + 305, hb. £70.00, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6466-6The subject of this collection is rather narrower than the title suggests. While it does indeed seek to broaden our understanding of the dissemination of news in Early Modern Europe, the issue of 'contemporaneity' is barely addressed by most of the contributors. According to Brendan Dooley, a collective sense of contemporaneity began to emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the increasingly speedy dissemination of news across Europe encouraged individuals to think of themselves as inhabiting a 'shared present'. This is an interesting and plausible idea, but the evidence that Dooley presents is patchy and anecdotal. While there were certainly quantitative changes in the volume of news and the speed with which it spread, it is not clear that this resulted in a genuine qualitative change in the way people perceived time and space. Even if we accept that a new notion of contemporaneity really did emerge, questions about its timing, extent and consequences still remain, and readers will not find many answers in this volume. Rather than setting a common agenda for the contributors, it feels as though this idea has been retrospectively foisted on them.The chapters in this collection are instead primarily concerned with the dissemination of news across Europe. As Dooley points out, much of the existing scholarship examines how reports circulated within individual countries, but readers often had an intense interest in events occurring in distant parts of Europe, and news was not constrained by national barriers. This volume charts the development of news stories as they spread through pan-European networks of information and as they passed from the spoken word to manuscript to print and back again.The large group of contributors that Dooley has gathered together are drawn from an impressively broad range of countries and disciplines, and the quality and scope of their chapters are equally varied. Several are concerned with information networks and sites of news exchange. Cristina Beltran gives a fascinating but largely descriptive account of the vast news network through which Philip II sought to gather information and transmit his orders, while Paul Arblaster explores the relative decline of another hub of communications, Antwerp. Astrid Blome, in her illuminating study of the 'offices of intelligence' where both private and public information was exchanged, reminds us that we should not distinguish too sharply between news and other forms of information. …