Years of News: Event and Narration in Early Modern Times, edited by Brendan Dooley and Paolo Molino

How much sea biscuit was on the Spanish Armada in 1588? A newsletter sent to Venice that year inventories 1.9 million tons (25). Yet, in an apparently leaked document sent to the Spanish court, it was revealed that there were only 400 tons on one ship. However, a 1968 article dispels such hopeful numbers: “no more than 110,000 tons” (26). Brendan Dooley finds—and I believe him—that a 1586 report of a sea biscuit count registers around 379,000 tons. But how much tonnage of sea biscuit would we actually find on the Spanish Armada? We will never know.How did anyone know anything in 1588? Where would they read it, or where would they hear it, and when would that happen? Who would write it? Where would it be printed? One volume of essays cannot answer all these questions as much is lost among what must have seemed the ephemera of the time—the handbills, the pamphlets, the oral reports that were not immediately written down but somehow printed in a published book that sold at a Frankfort book fair. The authors whose work is collected in Years of News: Event and Narration in Early Modern Times, edited by Dooley and Paolo Molino, treat different years and events as case studies for the most up-to-date technologies of mediation that would provide European audiences with the details of a world that, as Andrew Pettegree (2014) has written, “came to know about itself.”That last phrase comes from Andrew Pettegree’s excellent The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (2014). In that book’s vivid subtitle, the world, not merely a person or a group of people within it, comes to know itself. From Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman to (most recently) CNN anchor Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025), there is this tendency within media writing to turn abstractions into agents or objects. And it becomes alive, pulsating with vivifying information. This is no mere “structural transformation,” à la Jürgen Habermas, but a transubstantiation. As such things go (think Harold Bloom on Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt on Lucretius, and Charles Taylor on secularism), a subjectivity is invented (by whom, for whom?) that might be considered modern. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s (1979) pioneering work claims that the printing press is “an agent of change.” In Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982/2012), print becomes a catalyst, the subject of sentences rather than an object exploited: it “restructures consciousness” (78). In one section Ong begins each paragraph with print as an agent, for instance: “Print not printers created a new sense of private ownership over words” (78). When a writer like Pettegree uses the phrase birth of the newspaper, there is a tendency to see the printing press laboring to produce its inky child.In Years of News, the word rhetoric takes on its most obvious and sometimes necessarily simplistic connotation (as “embellishment,” “ornamentation,” or “naked persuasion”). The authors collected in it are primarily historians. As such, the essays are dense with data rather than consumed by theory. Given that the word event appears in the subtitle of the collection, I was expecting more discussion of the explosive rupturing of political and ontological tectonics outlined by Alain Badiou, but he is never referenced. Yet the strength of the book is in its narrower scope and polyglot emphasis on primary texts, the locations from which they emerged, and the charged political situations they chronicled. Historians of rhetoric will read this volume with an eye toward bringing what we might call our scholarship to the practical fictions of news and information that it helps to unsettle further. As a historical overview with its focused look at individual years, it admirably avoids sweeping gestures, and, instead, turns to case studies of primary texts and their transmission. The essays in it do not make any grand claims, so they offer a trajectory that resists easy narrativizations even as they reveal the messy conditions, awkward inventions, and wracked genealogies that will be crystalized in the way we (mis?)understand information delivery. The writers “agree that what appears on the page is an indelible heritage of societies and those who lived them” (21). The map of primary sources will be of great interest to rhetoricians. In “delving as deeply as they dare, into the characters, the words, the sentences, the texts of news,” the writers “gravitate toward estrangement rather than familiarity” (15). Again, it is the aim of this volume not to produce a clear teleology or to connect Europeans who had only the vaguest sense of momentous social change but to show the fragmentation of early modern Europe even as an evolving news media tried to bring its countries together.Moving chronologically, each chapter covers an individual year and a few major events, conjecturing how audiences came to understand occurrence and impact. In setting the prologue in 1588, Dooley establishes a prehistory to any organized news system by showing how difficult it is to unpack “patterns of transmission and distribution” (27). Paul Arblaster looks to 1604, long before the advent of the weekly press, when astrological prognostication was still a way of making the future legible. Yet mysticism could be countered by the actual events described in semiannual accounts that were sold at the Frankfurt book fairs, where “those reading the news in 1604 did so with one eye on the past and another eye on the future” (51). In looking to the violent year of 1618, Dooley turns our attention to the eruption of the Thirty Years’ War and a “vast vernacular explosion” where “disease and disaster haunt every page” (53). Working through printed gazettes and handwritten newsletters as well as book collections and sensationalized accounts, Dooley shows the kind of news to which privileged courtly audiences might have access and the differences between that and what the general reader might come to know much later. Nick Brownlees surveys the publications of 1623, the first year of serial news in England, in which a “close personal relationship is established with the reader” (80). In the pages of English corantos, in which one would learn about Prince Charles’s disastrous journey to Madrid to woo the Spanish infanta, Brownlees finds the beginning of a style that moves beyond “the simple transition of facts and information” toward a prose that resembles modern journalism (94).That style changed rapidly in different instantiations, as Carmen Espejo-Cala explains in her look at the Spanish euphoria over significant military victories reported in 1623 gazettes. The nascent news media joined playwrights, visual artists, and poets in contributing to a “framing” of events as an annus mirabilis, a year of wonders. Even if the effort to report what really happened was countered by a monarchal regime that was interested only in celebrating its accomplishments, the language of the gazette writers and editors betrays their nervousness about the ethics of distributing government-sanctioned hype. In a shorter and more focused contribution, Mario Infelise looks to the 1636 Italian translation of two German mercuries, books covering a wide swath of European history. This is an example of news being reported from original sources but without an attendant objectivity and, instead, an eye toward the reception of a national audience. Davide Boerio explores 1648, when news reports did not merely chronicle political and social unrest but caused it. The Neapolitan insurrection—one of many European revolutions of the middle of the century—may have its roots in a new conceptual language in which common people began to emerge as protagonists rather than merely the objects of suppression. Similarly, Andreas Würgler covers the 1653 Swiss Peasants’ War, an intense social conflict reported in England as “differences” and “troubles.” In compelling contrast to Boerio’s chapter, Würgler notes that these peasants could be viewed as a dangerous political force yet one that had “no influence on how their movement should be labeled” (157). Again, the competing motives behind information delivery led to readers confounded by an elusive international stage with no clear heroes and villains.As the final articles approach what might resemble a modern media landscape, the authors still unsettle that assumption. Giulia Delogu vividly depicts the newly established free port of Marseille as a “news factory” and the news about it as part of a “transmedial panorama” (160). Playing on the phrase make the news, Delogu shows how this crucial vector could produce information without its existence being acknowledged as an indication of where it was gathered. In an entry that synthesizes astrological predictions, incendiary preaching, and manuscript propaganda, Pasquale Palmieri reveals how European audiences might have encountered news of the decisive victory of the Holy Roman Empire in vanquishing the infidel forces of the Ottoman Empire and expelling them from Vienna. The victory was a “detonator of communication needs” as it “intensified people’s encounter with voices, gestures, images, and performances . . . stimulating a decidedly multisensory experience of the news” (180). In the wake of William of Orange and his wife, Mary, becoming the monarchs of England, Joop W. Koopmans probes Dutch courantiers, which largely ignore local news in favor of an international stage on which national diplomatic activities were proving crucial. Local news, it seems, would be passed along orally, as printed reports favoring the distant and the remarkable. Fittingly, even though she writes about the year 1700, Marion Brétéché destabilizes any clear idea of a uniform international press at this stage of technological development. Rather, the Francophone reports of the death of Charles II was “polycentric,” more interpretation than reportage, with “differing conceptions of information and the role of the press.” In describing her analysis as “free from teleological basis,” her closing chapter emphasizes a media in a state of defiant flux and information as far from a static concept (200). Again, that there is no conclusive trajectory is one of the revealing arguments this collection makes.Questions for historians of rhetoric might include fluctuations of rhetorical education and style in the European tradition as they developed alongside pamphlets, broadsides, gazettes, and mercuries. As rhetoric transitioned and was sometimes rejected by influential members of a new international culture of scientific objectivity, the European intellectual tradition was transformed by theories of communication after 1660 (i.e., after Descartes and the founding of the Royal Society in England) from earlier theories that still could be seen as part of a humanist project. This vibrant intellectual tradition contributed to a question many of the authors included in this volume ask. What is truth in narrative?For instance, at one point in his article, Brownlees describes a pamphlet by the Stuart loyalist John Taylor, “the Water Poet,” who claims to have witnessed Charles I return from Spain. In what seems a rudimentary use of the appellation, one of the sections is described as a “rhetorical, eulogistic account” (9), apparently intentional for this rapt observer entranced with the Stuart mythos and dedicated to disseminating it. The question for scholars of the history of rhetoric is what Taylor might have understood as rhetoric—in this case, apparently, epideictic and deliberative, given his political proclivities. Brownlees does not us give us much information about Taylor, a prolific, fascinating, but mostly bad writer who had little formal education and was known as the water poet because he was a waterman, one of the many notoriously disreputable boatmen one would find on the Thames. Though—like the other authors—Brownlees is more interested in the transmission of news, he offers a vivid reading of this pamphlet and the way it presents ostensibly neutral facts to affirm a Stuart cosmology. Hence, alongside Brownlees’s more comparative historical work, there is room for rhetoricians to weigh in on what he describes as “journalism that amounts to more than the simple transmission of facts and information” and his contention that “the style of serialized news of 1623 is a precursor of modern journalism” (49). Those working in early modern rhetorical theory who trace the presentation of neutrality—its style—in these emergent moments might contribute much to parallel informed studies of rhetoric in Spain, France, and England.A common and humble gesture that many of the authors make in Years of News is to conclude by saying that their work is not final and that there is much more to be done. In an afterword, they note that they have “perhaps overstayed their welcome in the tumultuous first century of news” (225), and this reviewer disagrees. The first century of news media has much to tell us about the relationship between rhetorical presentation and journalistic objectivity in its earliest stages. Rather than claiming finality, the last words of the volume are “stay tuned” (226). And, in this, we might see an invitation to readers of Journal for the History of Rhetoric to contribute.