Breaking news! How stories spread in early modern Europe

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. If you lived in 16th century London, would you have any idea what was happening in Paris, Venice or Frankfurt? Well, yes, according to Jod Raymond Wren, and that news might reach you quicker than you would expect. In this episode, I speak to Jode about his new book, The Great Exchange. It uncovers a complex network of communication that was operating across Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of modern mass media, and we touched on everything from ambassadors, news bulletins to emerging postal services.

So why is this a particularly interesting period in the story of news? What happens at the beginning of this period is that we see the the first soundings of the regular and effective spread of news across Europe and the beginning of an expectation. that you might receive news next week. Previously, when news happened, you might hear it, but from around 1400 to 1500 we begin to see this expectation that there will be news, there will be more news, we can rely on there being more news this week. We see the first soundings of that around fourteen hundred, I think.

Oh, so there's loads of fascinating stuff to get into here with how exactly news was spread, who was spreading it. But before we get into any of that, what are we actually talking about when we're talking about news in this period? What kind of subjects were deemed worthy of spreading across the continent? So if you look at newsletters, if if they're exchanged among merchants, it'll be financial news, it'll be news of spices and trade and so on, but more generally news of war, battles, court activity, royal entries, royal ceremonies, uh, you'll see news of disasters, floods, plagues, earthquakes, that that kind of thing. So, I mean, the news that moves a big distance is news of that kind of complexion.

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