The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself by Andrew Pettegree (review)

Following The Book in the Renaissance, his hugely important study of the Renaissance book (and ephemera) trade (2010), Andrew Pettegree has written The Invention of News, a sweeping survey covering ten countries and about four centuries (1400–1800) of activity in the formulation, distribution, and reception of news, that “multimedia exchange of conversation and gossip, civic ceremony and celebration, sermons and official proclamations, and then, in the age of print, pamphlets, edicts, ballads, journals and the first news-sheets” (cover).

Pettegree has so much information to offer that it must have been very difficult to manage the narrative. The first part of the book, “The Beginnings of News Publication,” is composed of seven chapters covering the medieval period and the earliest Renaissance. At this time, Pettegree explains, news was the prerogative of political elites: news reports were created and transmitted by trusted sources; written reports, especially anonymous ones, were not trusted. In this era, reports of news gained credibility from the reputation of the person who delivered them. To be sure, there was an awareness that those bringing the news were likely to be interested parties, but even so, interpersonal news networks were favored above written reports. Like ecclesiastical and political elites, merchants were of course interested in news reports, and they needed to know which were trustworthy and which were not. During the late medieval and early Renaissance eras, Pettegree points out, merchants became the principal consumers of news, and they were often its most reliable suppliers.

News was more plentiful in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the familiar problem of determining its veracity became especially important because the European wars could bring potentially deadly false reports. In an era of wars, corroboration of reports was essential to imperial decision making. By the time the search for and dissemination of news became an industry, in which it could be traded for profit, the problem of credibility had become even more acute. The “interested” nature of news reporting, along with the partisan efforts behind the Reformation, complicated the situation for merchants, who needed impartial reports in order to secure and vend their wares. Pettegree shows that news took on a particularly sectarian character at this time. Because the printed news could be partisan and sectarian, scribal news services such as the Italian avvisi still engaged successfully in their exclusive manuscript services; indeed, he demonstrates that such confidential manuscript news services survived alongside print materials well into the eighteenth century. The function and method of reporting changed at this time, as news entered into pamphlet form in an era when pamphlets embraced the passionate (and thus “interested”) advocacy of the Reformation. No longer could news be conceived of as dispassionate. News pamphlets took positions on their content, and authors wrote their “news” to persuade as well as to inform.

The shift in approach did not go unnoticed by local elites. Those used to receiving news privately by paying for it, and thus determining its content, would not step aside as if printed news were indeed the great democratizing factor that it has sometimes been credited to be. Rather, the elites sought to control the new commercial news market by providing funds for those who would write in their favor, using such news reporting to foster their policies and explain their process of leadership. Pettegree hastens to point out that though the period is often portrayed as autocratic and operating without representative government, the elites’ (especially the princes’) use of print to explain policy, and the background to policy, indicates that leaders invested much effort and funds in creating an informed population.

In the early stages of news reporting, then, no one made money from the exchange of news. Only in the sixteenth century did news reportage reach a place of systematization and commercialization. Those first to make money circulating news were from the Italian states; many of Europe’s rulers and their...