The Commonwealth of Paper: Print, News and The Staple of News

Abstract

The tangible effects of an emerging print culture in the seventeenth century on the availability of news can and have been dated to the 1620s. That decade witnessed the circulation of corantos, news-sheets deriving from the Continent and relating the progress of the European wars; it also saw the transition towards domestically printed newsbooks. Such happenings have been seen as liberating and potentially democratizing in their provision of news for a wider audience. David Norbrook has argued that, in the 1620s There was a significant expansion in the political public sphere … an emergent civil society whose means of communication — reports of parliamentary debates, newsletters, satires, and so on — circulated horizontally, cutting across the vertical power structures emanating from the court.1 In their political and religious bias, however, these same literary productions in print have been viewed as examples of the suscep-tibility of news to contentious issues such as ‘censorship’ and ‘propaganda’. Terms such as these require more thoughtful definition in their application to the early modern period. Both are anachronistic invocations, linguistic projections back from later times.KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyLiterary ProductionEarly Modern PeriodParliamentary DebateUnited ProvinceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.