Warnings out of Germany: reinventing continental prodigies for the English press, 1618-1638

It was a truism in the early modern period that unrest in the human realm would be accompanied by disorder in nature, and the devastating Thirty Years War (1618–1648) furnished convincing proof. The wars were accompanied by reports of celestial aberrations and apparitions, ‘monstrous’ births, inexplicable appearances of blood, and bizarre animal behaviour. Such phenomena formed a sizeable minority of the serial news printed by Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne’s London publishing syndicate from c. 1620. This paper demonstrates, however, that these articles of ‘strange news’ were frequently framed in ambivalent, even sceptical language, complicating readers’ ability to extract meaning from them. By contrast, a compilation published in 1638, The Warnings of Germany, reframed and sometimes rewrote earlier reports to provide a didactic interpretation of 20 years’ worth of continental prodigies. This analysis underscores the multifarious nature of London’s news press, which offered readers multiple ways of digesting foreign news.