About this item
Long before the invention of printing, let alone the availability of a daily newspaper, people desired to be informed. In the pre-industrial era news was gathered and shared through conversation and gossip, civic ceremony, celebration, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, edicts, ballads, journals, and the first news-sheets, expanding the news community from local to worldwide. This groundbreaking book tracks the history of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries. It evaluates the unexpected variety of ways in which information was transmitted in the premodern world as well as the impact of expanding news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people's changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens - now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events - were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them.
About the Author
I began my career working on aspects of the European Reformation. My first book was a study of religious refugee communities in the sixteenth century, and since then I have published on the Dutch Revolt, and on the Reformation in Germany, France and England, as well as a general survey history of the sixteenth century. In the last years the focus of my research has shifted towards an interest in the history of communication, and especially the history of the book. I run a research group that in 2011 completed a survey of all books published before1601: the Universal Short Title Catalogue. This work continues with work to incorporate new discoveries and continue the survey into the seventeenth century. In 2010 I published an award-winning study of The Book in the Renaissance, and in 2014 The Invention of News: a study of the birth of a commercial culture of news publication in the four centuries between 1400 and 1800. I return to the Reformation for a study of Luther's media strategy, published in 2015 by Penguin as Brand Luther, 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation. I am now engaged in a study of the book world of the seventeenth century Dutch Republic, to be published in 2019 as Trading Books in the Age of Rembrandt. I am the lead editor of two monograph series: the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, and The Library of the Written Word. In 2012-2015 I served a three year term as Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. I welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate students working on any aspect of the Reformation or Book History.
