The Times Displayed: Late Seventeenth-Century English Commemorative Broadsheets and Media Hybridity

Abstract

English broadsheet prints are often regarded as being the forerunner of modern comic strip narratives. Late seventeenth-century English broadsheets created news by displaying the manners and social rituals of their times; they were, however, designed to be accessible to multiple types of literacies, and they demonstrate a lively sense of how space and image can create meaning without words. Commemorative in the sense of recording events of national interest and significance, including the London Plague, the freezing of the Thames River, and the Pope-burning pageants, these broadsheets captured audiences through image, word and sound, employing a hybrid media modality. They functioned to preserve records of events but also through narrative strategies to convey the news of the day, to capture the action of what was important and ongoing in terms of England as a nation.