Travelling Chronicles: News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century

Book excerpt: Travelling Chronicles presents fourteen episodes in the history of news, written by some of the leading scholars in the rapidly developing fields of news and newspaper studies. Ranging across eastern and western Europe and beyond, the chapters look back to the early modern period and into the eighteenth century to consider how the news of the past was gathered and spread, how news outlets gained respect and influence, how news functioned as a business, and also how the historiography of news can be conducted with the resources available to scholars today. Travelling Chronicles offers a timely analysis of early news, at a moment when historical newspaper archives are being widely digitalised and as the truth value of news in our own time undergoes intense scrutiny.