The newsletter is a *genre that communicates a particular kind of information within a particular kind of relationship. The information involves events, which are understood to be relevant and factual. This need not imply, however, that the news is current or recent, or even reliable or trustworthy, as much that passed in *early modern news exchange was neither of these things. Anything that was mutually recognized as news in a communication, whether by word of mouth, by letter, or in print, anything that was accepted in answer to the question What news? was news. A newsletter communicates news in writing, in manuscript or print, from one or more correspondents to one or more recipients, sent by post or messenger. The conventions of the form, which originate in purely practical circumstances, were soon appropriated for imaginary purposes, so the writers and recipients as well as the post or messenger could be fictional. These elements were turned into imaginative devices to create the illusion of personal communication, much as the letter form transforms the human voice into writing, to imply a virtual presence.
A letter involves speaking across distance in order to communicate to a real or implied reader what he or she wants or needs to know—so there is a way in which almost all letters involve news. However, a newsletter is something more than the area where these two terms overlap. Angel Day wrote in 1586 that the letter was “the messenger and familiar speeche of the absent.” The messenger brings news, which complements “familiar speech,” by which Day means personal, informal, sociable (and relating to the family). However, the early modern newsletter was a narrower and more precise form than this suggests. The newsletter was a material vehicle in which news was conveyed, and a set of conventions for presenting news. The medium is not reducible to the news it contains, and news isn’t reducible to the medium that conveyed it.
There were forms of newsletters in medieval Europe. We find them—intermittent and informal—in the communications in England among the Paston family, 1422–1509, sent by couriers and friends between Norfolk and London. Before Marin Sanudo’s famous diary, covering 1496–1533, there was that of another Venetian, Antonio Morisino, from the first half of the fifteenth century, who recorded various pieces of news extracted from newsletters usually reporting on a single event. And in the archive of Biagio Dolfin, Venetian consul in Alexandria 1418–20, there survive both single-topic newsletters and digests containing multiple paragraphs of impersonal news. These forms of communication passed among and between merchants and state officials. “It is impossible to trade without news,” wrote one merchant in 1401; so understood was this that mercantile companies formally established shared carrier services, named scarsella after the bags used to transport letters. Anticipating the postal service, scarsella systems are at least as old as the early fourteenth century, when they developed in Tuscany. Thus when the formal, semipublic avvisi system developed, as discussed below, this was the outcome of a rich group of existing practices, not the start of entirely new ones.
The newsletter as a form or medium of communication evolved and spread rapidly across Europe from 1450 to 1600, then remained consistent until about 1800. Personal letters containing news changed a great deal during this same period, but the newsletter as a genre remained recognizable and flourished in a stable form because it served an essential social function in Europe—and indeed can be said to have shaped the geography of Europe. The newsletter was one of several complementary vehicles, that is, newsletters were read alongside other documents, or received with spoken reports, in order to obtain the news an individual reader wanted. And the openness to complementary communications is one of the things that defines early modern news media. There was no notion that one might communicate “all the news that’s fit to print,” because readers always received news from multiple sources, and frequently compared them.
There were two kinds of newsletters, both in manuscript and in print, whether personal or commercial: those that described a single event, and those that described several events, or reported news from several places, in distinct paragraphs. In Too Much to Know, Ann Blair describes how information in this period circulated and was recycled in “morsels,” and the morsel of news was not the event but the paragraph. This is because of the uses of news in European politics, and to understand why these uses necessitated both the paragraph and the newsletter we must turn to two fields that developed regular newsletters to facilitate the conduct of their business: diplomacy and international trade.
With the introduction of resident ambassadors in late fifteenth-century Europe, states developed a semiformal means of communication. Ambassadors would send to their home city weekly reports of locally accumulated news; these reports would then be gathered up and sent back to all ambassadors, in paragraphs headed by source date and location (which was not always the place that the news concerned). Ambassadors then knew where the intelligence—which was an invaluable currency in the conduct of their office—originated and how old it was. Thus began the convention of paragraphs of news with the *metadata preserved. (Earlier merchants’ paragraphs of news, though sometimes similar, were less diligent on this point.) The diplomatic system was a *leaky one, and both the news it gathered and the practices associated with it seeped into broader society. The paragraphs were recycled by other professional news writers, and when news, originating with an ambassador or another scribe, was passed on, this metadata was preserved and added to. A typical paragraph of news might begin: “Amsterdam, 23 May. By letters from Venice dated the last week we hear news of a battle in Ragusa, where the Turk.…” The newsletter form that originated in ambassadorial communications was known as the avviso—a term with equivalents in most western European languages—and the avviso became the standard form for all newsletters reporting multiple events.
Merchants had relied on the exchange of information over distance, communicated by (irregular) messenger, from the fourteenth century or earlier. Mercantile news combined morsels of news, relating to war and politics, with specifically financial and commercial news. The latter was regularized into a variety of forms that accompanied newsletters, including bills of entries or customhouse bills (daily lists of commodities that were imported or exported at any given port), price currents (lists of commodities and their prices on the local market), and exchange rate currents (weekly lists of exchange rates). This kind of data was increasingly kept distinct from the more general news exchanged within and between merchants’ communities. Lloyd’s List—a printed weekly journal listing the ships arriving in and departing from British and overseas ports—was founded by the coffee merchant Edward Lloyd in the 1690s and still survives; while certainly innovative, it was also precisely typical of specialization of news forms that were intended to supplement newsletters. The famous collection of newsletters belonging to the Fuggers, dated 1568–1605, which were once thought to be the product of the family’s own news-gathering networks, is in fact made up of merely standard avvisi, commercially available across Europe. This shows the scholarly predisposition to mistake the routine for the exceptional; but it also shows that the rise of the avvisi provided an important and transformative service for merchants, allowing them to replace an expensive source for some of their news with a cheaper, general product.
Paragraphs of news were shared in marketplaces, church porches, barbershops, and, later, *coffeehouses. In cities with merchants, early modern *scriptoria, and printing houses, paragraphs were copied by hand, translated, recombined, added to, and printed. The entrepôts were the nodes in a network of news communication that traversed Europe. When a major news event provided reports that were longer than the typical diplomatic dispatch of paragraph—such as the battles of Chioggia, Lepanto, or Chaldiran—a single-subject news report would be written; this would be communicated as a “separate,” an independent document that could accompany a personal letter or an avviso or both, or be sold separately, or turned into a printed pamphlet. The separate was frequently in letter form, containing an eyewitness account, or an account gathered from several sources but digested within an authorial or editorial voice; alternatively, it might assume the form of an impersonal document, though the news content was similar or identical in both cases.
The content of these newsletters, in both forms, included politics, ceremonial reports from courts, military dispatches, and news of trade, disasters, and to a lesser extent crimes and news of wonders and sensation. In early seventeenth-century Oxford Robert Burton would describe the news as a burdensome superfluity:
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c.
The hyperbole and copia express the wonder, but the summary is representative.
The development of this culture of news depended on improving transport infrastructure, and especially on the creation of postal services in the early sixteenth century, which replaced earlier, more expensive carriers. States and rulers discovered the benefits of outsourcing the use of staging posts as a means of sending messages. These postal services were opened to the public as a means of defraying costs and improving efficiency. By the early seventeenth century much of Europe was covered by long-distance postal services (which could be complemented at the local level by private messengers and carriers). Some involved international transport, but even where this was not available it was possible to send letters by more than one postal service. The geography of early modern news is closely related to the geography of the early modern post. This is also true of temporality: the weekly periodicity of postal services shaped the practices of gathering news and determined the speeds at which it jumped across Europe. It is because of this communications network that we can find the same paragraph of news in a manuscript newsletter in Italian in Venice one month, and in a printed newsletter in Spanish in Madrid two months later.
The newsletter forms were developed within manuscript communication in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, beginning in Italy and then moving north and west. From the early sixteenth century both avvisi and separate newsletters were occasionally printed, initially when a significant event happened. The early printed forms of news were entirely derived from the manuscript culture and were an opportunistic response by printers and *publishers to the resources—of text, paper, and printing equipment—that were at hand. When printed news periodicals appeared in the early seventeenth century—in Germany, the Netherlands, England, France, and, later, Spain and Italy and other European states—they were printed versions of avvisi. The reliability or credibility—and we shouldn’t underestimate the careful skepticism of early modern newsreaders—depended on the system that communicated the news, not on the personal authority of the reporter. This printed form developed over decades, and different regions of Europe gradually acculturated the form, adapting it to local printing practices, and adding local news, but the form remained embedded in the printed newspaper through to the end of the handpress period.
There is an important degree of continuity here. Paragraphs have a continuous life as they move among cities, genres, languages, and modes of reproduction, even while they are transformed and recombined in different ways. The forms move too, and the newsletter continues to exist in manuscript and printed forms even as it changes. The newsletter was an international form in essence, and it constituted a community of shared news among writers and readers who did not directly communicate among themselves, but instead participated in a network. It was this that gave Europe a political identity in the early modern period.
The newsletter—as something other than a personal communication—disappeared into commercial media in the age of nationalism, of revolutions, and of capital. If we look for it in the industrial and postindustrial world we can find analogs, though that vital continuity with the earlier newsletter does not exist. We can, however, find corporate newsletters, in which an artificial body, such as a university, brings together a community of customers and employees, albeit these units do not necessarily participate voluntarily. An analog can be found on the *internet in the form of news digest websites, or services such as Nuzzle, which identify news stories that are shared by people with whom you are virtually connected. It is the algorithm that has replaced the newsletter in the twenty-first century.
Joad Raymond
See also journals; letters; networks; newspapers; postal customers; public sphere; readers