Early Modern News

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0:00

Foreign. You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to John Gallagher about how news would spread through Europe in the early modern period. John Gallagher is a historian of language, education and migration at Leeds University, though he's currently in Addis Ababa, learning al Muharik. His piece in the latest issue of the LRP is a review two books, Postal the Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Madura and the Great Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren. Hello John, and thank you so much for joining me.

0:58

Hi Tom, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

1:40

So here we are, thousands of miles apart, but having a conversation more or less as if we were in the same room, and people all around the world will be able to listen to us within seconds of this podcast episode being uploaded. And that speed of communication, essentially instantaneous, is something we mostly take for granted these days, for better or worse. But once upon a time, of course, and in the period you write about in your piece, information, as you put it, could move no faster than the bodies that carried it, and those bodies being mostly people on horseback. So how fast was that?

1:43

So you've got, I think, about as fast as you can ride a horse for about two hours before you start causing really serious damage to it. It's about 15 km an hour, which puts a real limit on fast and how far you can go. You can get a little bit faster with carrier pigeons, who I'm told clock in at about 25 km per hour in this period, but constantly in early modern Europe and in the wider world. So we're talking kind of 16th, 17th 18th centuries and around. Those who are seeking to carry information or to carry news or to carry goods are constantly running up against these very hard physical limits. And that don't really shift until we get to really, things like the telegraph much later on.

2:16

But even given that absolute physical limit, that constraint, there were ways of getting as close as possible to it, weren't there, of maximizing efficiency through infrastructure, essentially?

3:00

Absolutely.

3:11

And so what were those?

3:11

Yeah, so what you get. One of the key developments in this period that starts to speed up the transition of the male is the development of relay posts, where you've got an increasingly efficient system whereby one rider will hand off to another rider regularly across a predetermined route. So they'll have a bag of mail, usually lined with cotton and waxen or leather on the outside, so as to stop it getting waterlogged on the way, and that they will effectively pelt as far and as fast as they can along a predetermined route. And then at a post, so at a kind of way station, which is often something like an inn or tavern in the countryside, they will either hand over to another rider or they will switch to a fresh horse. So this means that they can maintain kind of the maximum possible speeds for transmitting mail. So that's one of the big shifts that's happening in this period. But underlying that is a set of changes in infrastructure, which are absolutely essential here, and that is that roads in Europe are steadily getting better. They're getting more passable, they're getting more reliable. They're getting, in some ways, more protected from banditry and things like that. And there's a growing set of protections that are applied to people who are carrying post and who are carrying mail, even though they're never quite as safe as they might wish to be. But that infrastructure is interesting as well, because we tend to think today of information infrastructure, certainly a physical infrastructure, as being something that the state is kind of the prime mover in. It's the state that has the money. It's the state that puts it together. And what we see in this period is families like the Tacis, the northern Italian postal dynasty that's the subject of Rachel Maduro's book. So families like the Tassis putting large amounts of their own money and their own political capital into developing a series of roads first across the north of Italy. So the area around kind of the Veneto and around Milan and Bergamo, kind of underneath the Alps, but also that's called the Italian road across kind of the top of northern Italy, but also up through Trent Trento and into northern Italy, up to Augsburg to Cologne, to Antwerp and then further afield even to places like Prague. So that infrastructure is across the period that both of these books by Madura and Wren are looking at. That infrastructure is steadily getting better by a mixture of private and state work, but in which families like the Tassis have a really essential role.

3:13

I suppose one of those things about the, as you're saying, the fixed routes and so on, that even if so the speed is limited, but there's a predictability to it. So you can know, all right, it's going to take a week to get from A to B or you know, a month to get from A to B to C. But that's, that's known and that question, I mean, so who the relationship between the private family, private business and the state? I suppose it was quite a large question of what was the nature of the state at that time. Because in a sense the state were other private families, weren't they? As a sense you had, the Duke of Mantua is the state and so that's one kind of private family. So the Tassis, I mean, how different were they as a powerful family from for example, the Dukes of Manchu?

5:42

Yeah, I suppose you're right that they're providing services to a state or a set of states that look very different to what we'd expect today. So one of the ways that they develop this kind of Europe wide postal infrastructure and this kind of central role in how post is conveyed across Europe is because they develop these relationships in the 15th and 16th century with the House of Habsburg, which rules this series, this patchwork of territories across large chunks of Europe. But within Italy you have exactly this issue where you've got a variety of princes of various backgrounds. So, you know, Ecclesiastes and temporal princes, all of whom are very jealous of their own territories and of their own power to control what moves through those territories in terms of materials but also in terms of information. This is something that comes out really beautifully from Madura's book is the fact that you have this tension in a period of warfare on the Italian peninsula as well, where you know, the great powers of Europe are fighting in Italy, that you have this tension over how far an individual ruler, be that the Duke of Mantua, be that the Pope, has the power and the ability to limit others from passing information and from bringing mail through their own territories. And that's something that's, you know, that's attention throughout the period. Something we see when the Tasis postmaster, Giovannantonio Tassis, is taken prisoner and kept in jail, kept in a papal jail for well over a year, probably tortured in that period of time as well. And that's a power struggle over who gets to control the passage of information in the Papal States. Maduro has these great accounts of pawnshops in places like Rimini, which were kind of handover points at the edges of states in early modern Italy. So while by the end of the period, you've ended up with a system that is far more seamless than anything that came before, and where a set of principles about the inviolability of the posts themselves have begun to be worked out properly between European powers, that comes out of a much more fragmented system of one that's kind of very much about these kind of local and regional rivalries, and one where the Tassis are, as you say, you know, a power broking family in their own right alongside these other dynasties in Italy and in Europe more broadly.

6:26

So was that a point at which the Post du Mail did acquire a kind of diplomatic immunity? That it was. There were agreements that were said, okay, the, you know, the Post can now travel through, through my, my territory. Or did it come and go those, those freedoms?

8:59

So they do come and go. Right. And one of the things that we learn from Medora is that you've got these moments of crisis, like the arrest of Giovann Antonio Tassis, which, you know, and she paints him ultimately as kind of. I don't know if she'd, if she'd accept this framing, but almost as a martyr to the inviolability of the Post. And it's through his suffering and the outrage that it sparks, right, and to the protests against the seizure and abuse of a postmaster that it sparks, that these ideas that posts should be allowed to pass without hindrance through other territories are kind of gradually developed, but it's not a linear process. And nor is that kind of process of developing infrastructure. And one of the big shifts that we have to take into account is the 30 years war is the fact that Central Europe is torn apart by three decades of extraordinarily violent political and religious conflict from 1618 to 1648. And that. That results in huge disruption to the free passage of information, huge disruption to what were increasingly established postal routes and postal systems. You even see within the TACIS that they have a Frankfurt postmaster who is not religiously or politically aligned with them. And there's great tension even within this kind of sprawling family firm. Occasioned by the divisions of the Thirty Years War. But it means that when you get to 1648 and the peace of Westphalia and these kind of powers coming together to think about a new order, that increasingly these questions of the right of information or the right of information carriers to pass freely are being kind of more, more clearly laid out. But it's never, you know, it's never a very clear progression towards the light, if that makes sense.

9:16

Absolutely. And that question of the inviolability, I mean, as you say in the piece, that people would go to quite clever lengths to prevent the letters from being openable and read by someone who's not meant to be reading them. But at the same time there were people who were developing equally clever methods of opening the post and reading it. And how much of that went on, how much sort of steaming open of letters was there?

11:06

So this is a really essential addendum to what I've just said. So we've got kind of the, we've got the grand progress of international agreements and principles by which information can travel, but at the same time there is a huge amount of surveillance and interruption of posts, just of the kind that operates with at least some kind of plausible deniability. So this is the period of what are called black chambers. They've been amazingly written about by Nadine Ackerman, among others, where you have state run bureaus for the interruption and reading of ongoing mail. And one of the things that Maduro argues is that this kind of thing is going on from much earlier than we actually have evidence of it happening. That kind of surveillance and interruption of mail are built in from a really early period. And she presents this as a kind of devil's bargain that's made between families like the Tacis and postmasters like the Tasis or you know, the Venetian company of couriers and the powers in whose territories they are working and effectively says that, you know, the agreement is that, that if you allow me to pass through, you know, pass efficiently through your lands and to operate this service, we may be able to provide you with first sight of crucial materials that you need to know about. So there is kind of espionage and interruption of mail built in from a really, really early date. But this is the kind of thing where we get hints. There's a wonderful moment where a 17th century correspondent in France pens a note in her own letters to the person she knows is going to open them saying, you know, can you just make sure that you at least put them in their envelopes after you've read Them indicating that this is just so expected that you know it's going to happen. So you may as well. It kind of reminds me of a couple of years ago when we all used to talk about our own NSA agent. So whoever had been assigned to read our emails at the same time. And there's a kind of running gag about this in a lot of early modern correspondence. And you do get a variety of devious methods of opening mail. So for instance, in theory, if you've got a lovely wax seal, as much early modern correspondence does, that should be enough to make sure that your letter can't be opened. You've sealed it with your own signet, it should remain inviolable. But there are all sorts of kind of nasty methods involving steam and mercury which allow you to take an impression of the seal, open the letter, reseal it and send it along its own way. You see a bunch of these kind of tactics being used. Something where we've got brilliant recent research on in the last few years is the technique known as letter locking, whereby people use elaborate systems of cuts and folds to fold together their own letters in such a way that they can't be opened without breaking some of the paper, without leaving a material trace of the letters having been opened. And they're really, really ingenious. And they seem to have been quite a useful way for people to keep their correspondence private. There's even some that seem to have had a kind of self destruct feature where there's no way to open certain kinds of message without destroying the contents. But I should say as well that there are ways around. We shouldn't just think about information traveling by post as just being about what's written on the page. Because, you know, since ancient history at least, there's also the capacity for messengers themselves to carry money, for messengers themselves to carry more than it seems that they are carrying. And I'm reading at the moment Penny Roberts new book out about the capture of a Huguenot courier on his way to England in the early 1570s. And he, like at least one other courier in this period on the same route, is carrying a big sack, a big kind of like a rucksack full of onions and cheese, but with a false bottom underneath which is hidden a variety of secret correspondence going to Huguenots in exile in England. And so, you know, there's the capacity to carry letters, but there's also, you get a lot in early modern letters, people saying things like the bearer will tell you more. You can ask this person, you know, and so there's a sense in which you've got a kind of, I don't want to say a two factor authentication, but there is an element in which you can break up aspects of your message and share them between the written and the bearer themselves. And that's a really important aspect of how information moves in the early modern period.

11:28

We're going to be briefly interrupted now by an ad break, but we'll be back in a moment to talk more about the post and the news in early modern Europe.

15:48

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15:59

This is the LRB podcast. I'm talking to John Gallagher about postal systems and news spreading systems in early modern Europe. I mean, it's a sort of slightly absurd example, but just thinking of Postman Pat, the children's character that is that he delivers the mail, but he also carries, you know, he will pass messages on to people himself that, you know, because the postman is going, he's going to all the farms. So if you need a message taken, you don't necessarily have to write a letter and put it in the post. You can just tell the postman, well.

16:34

This, I mean, you know, I don't know how far I can stretch the early modern Postman Pat example, but one of the really interesting things that you get is that, that the posts become essential to entirely or largely separate areas of life and the economy. And one of the things which really interests me here is the postal coach. So with this improved infrastructure and this set of timetables for the movement of mail, you've also got coaches that are going from waystation to way station along major roads throughout Europe. And this is one of the things without which, for instance, the Grand Tour and early modern tourism as we know them just wouldn't exist. This is very much the kind of the conveyance that makes these forms of Travel that characterize 17th and 18th century elite culture possible. So you've got kind of people and tourists moving at the same. You know, the post facilitates all of these other kinds of movement and travel at the same Time, it facilitates the movement of information.

17:03

And how safe was it? Because you think of a stagecoach, some people would immediately think of a highwayman holding it up. I mean, how much highway robbery.

17:59

It seems to have been quite a bit in late 16th century Italy. So bandits were a recognized feature of travel. And one of the reasons that they single out the people carrying post is because they are known for carrying not just letters, but also valuables. So there's a great example in Maduro's book where she has a carrier who has been on the road to or from Mantua, I can't quite remember, but who is carrying just an extraordinary array of kind of coins and bits and boxes that must have weighed him down enormously in this sense of, you know, the letters are there, but it's part of a postman pat like holistic delivery service, which is happening, which makes him a really tempting target for bandits. And, you know, I mean, something that I adored in this was I had not realized there's a really wonderful array of disguises being used by bandits in northern Italy in this period. Leather masks are one, but also false beards and mustaches. So kind of like a, you know, like something out of a Western, you have these kind of things happening. And there are these great statements by postal officials and the carriers of the post who have gone to great lengths to avoid the mail falling into the hands of bandits, in part because if it does happen, there is immediately a suspicion that they're in cahoots and that they show up battered and bruised at the next weigh station. They say, you won't believe the terrible thing that's happened to me. And they pocket a portion of the spoils. But there are kind of these famous in the period examples of particular, particular carriers who died rather than give up the mail, and they become these kind of, again, martyrs to this idea of an inviolable postal service. But yeah, bandits never quite go away in this period.

18:08

And I mean, we've been talking about how information traveled within Europe, but obviously it was increasingly arriving from outside Europe as well.

19:54

Yes. And you see these information flows in the period where news items will be appearing, certainly from the Ottoman Empire, sometimes for further afield. It's like small amounts trickling, but tiny amounts trickling in from China and Japan. But you've also got a sense in which. And there's a lot more recent work on this, which is fantastic on how far north Africa the Maghreb was integrated into systems of European news as well. These are areas where there's regular mobility between North Africa and Southern Europe, where we know that the Mediterranean is a really, really connected zone and where individuals and items of news, even though they pass much more slowly because they're restricted by how fast people can move, but also restrictions on individual mobility as well, they are getting through. And it's really important. I mean, Venice is a place where this is absolutely essential. Where Venice is, this hub for news that is coming across the Mediterranean, that's coming from the Eastern Mediterranean, it's coming from the Ottoman Empire. It's one of the best places to hear the freshest news from the Ottoman Empire and at the same time is seeking to develop better connections with Egypt, with Morocco, with modern day Tunisia and Algeria as well. So Europe is more connected, I think, than many would expect, but it's never an unproblematic connection. There are all of these issues that result in the passage of information being slowed down. There's a fantastic example in Wren's book, which we'll talk about in a minute, I think, but this is a wonderful example where he speaks about the city of Ragusa, a modern day Dubrovnik, and where the Senate of Ragusa are coming under serious pressure from the Ottoman Empire at a moment when they are renegotiating their trading privileges with the Ottomans. They're being put under a lot of pressure because Ragusa is seen as being incredibly leaky. It's seen as being the main place through which privileged information is coming from Constantinople, getting into Western Europe. And that the Ragusin Senate passes a really draconian law at this point against the spreading on of foreign news, in part to bolster its credibility as somewhere where your information is safe and that it can be trusted not to leak.

20:03

I mean, something that you get across very clearly in your piece and the difference between these two books, that Madura's book is an account of a sort of a deliberately planned and deliberately created and put in place postal system with people. It's organized and it's deliberate. Whereas if I understand it correctly that Jo Raymond Wren's argument is more that the spread of news was a much more sort of spontaneous self organizing, a very different kind of system.

22:24

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And Wren kind of hammers this idea that the news and information system, which is extraordinary, which develops throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and into the 18th, that it was nobody's work or no one person's work, that it wasn't consciously organized to work as a system, and yet that it has these extraordinary functions of a network which we'll Talk about allowing people to attempt to verify the credibility of news, for instance. But I think with Madura's, I think one of the ways that I've talked about it is that she is almost bringing us the postmaster as hero, which doesn't mean that she's saying that postmasters and postmistresses were, you know, morally pure, that they weren't kind of tainted by all of these questions of surveillance and information sharing and corruption that I've mentioned earlier on. There's kind of major audits against one of her postmistresses at this point, this kind of, you know, suspected of having made away with or lost huge quantities of Habsburg money. But. But I think she's making the point that by the 18th century, once you get into Enlightenment Europe, the changes in infrastructure and the changes in information flows get taken on and represented as an achievement of the state and particularly as Europe is in an age of absolutism, that there's this idea of the postal service as a representation of the state and of the greatness of the increasingly modern state. And what she's trying to do, I think, is to reorient our understanding of how this all developed and reinstate the essential role that was played by private enterprise, that was played by private individuals. And the fact that this is a system unlike Wren's kind of great depersonalized news network, that Madura's postal system, that of the TASIS and others, is one which is grounded in, I suppose, individual entrepreneurship and this kind of commitment to developing something new, even if it gets adopted later on as something for the state to be proud of, it's not something that really fundamentally begins with the state.

22:49

I suppose one question, which is rather a large question that comes out of thinking about Ren's book is, I mean, what is news? Which is obviously an enormous question, but it does. I mean, it's one of those things that you talk, you know, that we. Those words that you use without really thinking about it. But in that question of what counts as news, what's gossip, what's private information, what's public information? This idea of the news as it were, that, well, we now we get from all sorts of sources, but you used to get, by putting the telly on at 6 o' clock in the evening, what did people understand by the news in 16, whatever.

24:54

Yeah. So I think we have to get away from maybe a more. A more contemporary idea. One of the news is the thing that's in the headlines, but also the news as something that is just conveyed by institutions or organizations of News, whether that's the newspaper or the broadcaster. Right. So there's news as a much more, maybe a much more capacious definition across early modern Europe. And it incorporates a number of things that we would feel less are less like news today. So for instance, it is news if there washes up in Denmark a giant fish that looks like a bishop, right? That's news. And that is news in just the same way as news of a recent battle or something like that. And people are not making distinctions as to what one of these is news and the other is not. And the same thing is true of gossip and rumor. And this is something that's really interesting here. And we see vestiges of it today in, you know, insider and gossip columns and you overheard in Westminster kind of things. But there are ways in which things like gossip and rumour which are essential to the workings of early modern societies, they kind of govern individual reputations and financial well being and all of these things. But there's a sense in which all of these are seen as being essential parts of news culture so that it is acceptable to report on gossip and rumour once you can ground it in number one, where it's coming from and why it's being spoken about and number two, its potential credibility. So there's a lot of, and Ren is really interesting on this. There's a lot of built in skepticism in news reporting in the early modern period where people will say, you know, there are rumors of such a victory, you know, in a battle somewhere far away, but they will build into this. The idea of, you know, we've heard it from one or two sources we don't yet know. We await the confirmation or the refutation of this kind of news. So news itself covers, I think, a much broader set of kinds of information that range from the political, the diplomatic, the financial, the commercial, to the supernatural and the religious, to what we would think of as the personal, you know, to gossip and rumor, whether that's, you know, about sex, death and life. Right. All of these things are bound up in news culture in a way that we are maybe more used to segmenting out.

25:30

Although you can find all of those things in a modern newspaper or in a modern website. I think perhaps that we like to think that news, that everything's got two sources and it's reliable and everything. But maybe, I mean, even before you get into the question of fake news, that maybe the news now and the news then are not so different in ways in which they were spread. I mean, you talk about people talking about it so word of mouth and people on the Rialto Bridge in Venice were telling each other these things. But at what point did print culture or written culture become associated with news?

27:58

Yeah, so, I mean, the beginnings of the relationship between writing and news obviously exists before the early modern period. But what you get from kind of the 14th century onwards, and you get really wonderful records of this in northern Italy in particular, is that you get this system of written manuscript updates from well placed correspondence. And these are known as avisi, so a singular aviso. And you can get one of these, you can kind of pay a subscription fee to someone who is based in a city of interest to you. And what they will send you is a digest of the news that they have heard. And that will be, essentially, the term Raymond uses is tagged. That will be tagged with the place that the news is coming from, the date on which it was heard, and any other relevant information. So giving you some chance to kind of weigh it up for yourself. So your correspondent from Genoa writes, you know, from Livorno, I hear that, you know, the price of a particular commodity is such a thing. You know, from Rome, I hear that the Pope is sick. And you can kind of buy into these avisi. And we know that the elite families of Europe are obsessed with collecting information in this style. We've got extraordinary collections of news material put together by families like the Medici in Italy or the Fuggers in Augsburg. This huge collection of Fugger Zeitung and the kind of news materials that were collected and archived for a major mercantile house to be able to monitor political and commercial affairs across Europe. So you see the kind of manuscript of wiso becoming really important across the 15th and 16th century. And the story of print is one that runs alongside, but not in a pleasingly linear way, the story of manuscript news. So you printed news which is kicking off in 17th century Europe and spreading across the continent. Obviously, the newsiest place in Europe in this period, to use Raymond's term, is Amsterdam, which is a huge number of newspapers, printed newspapers set up in the 17th century, but you have in the 16th century, you might get your news not in a form that looks like a newspaper, but in a particular pamphlet about a battle or an event or a place you would buy an individual pamphlet. You can buy these in London in the 1590s, for instance, often translated from Italian. And the thing that looks like the modern newspaper starts to emerge from about the 1620s onwards. But at the same time, there are lots of ways in which oral and manuscript forms of the transmission of news Continue alongside it. It is not the case that Europe gets the newspaper and thinks, here we go, this is the way we're going to organize our news going forward. You still have people singing ballads, which, you know, in places, Venice, we've got great records of this. And in England as well, you've got blind ballad singers in Madrid, kind of monopolizing headline news by singing about it in the streets. So, you know, singing is one way, as you've said, spoken word remains extraordinarily important in sites like the Rialto in Venice, also in places like the Royal Exchange or St Paul's in London, which are just known as being places where you hear the freshest news long before a compositor can put it into type, get it on the page and sell it. Orality really triumphs. And in places like Venice in the late 17th century, you could argue that print is really sluggish to replace manuscript and oral methods of sharing news, in part because these are places that have really, really good and effective traditions of spreading news in those ways. And print isn't yet seen as offering anything new. So the story of print is really essential here. But it's not a simple move from news is shared orally into news as shared by manuscript, and then into the rise of the newspaper.

28:34

And how did people know or how did people decide what to believe, which bits of news to accept as true and which to doubt?

32:28

Well, this is a part of Raymond's book that I've kind of been wrestling with. You know, I wrestled with it as I wrote the review, and since writing it, I've kind of continued to do so because he makes a really compelling case for this, built in skepticism in how news is received and how news is shared. And I say in the review that the hero, where Midoriya's hero is the postmaster and postmistress, that the hero of Raymond's telling is the paragraph, and for him, the paragraph is the unit of news. If you go back to the aviso, you get these individual paragraphs, each one with a particular item of news which is tagged with where it's coming from and how recent it is. And. And Raymond argues really convincingly that the paragraph remains the kind of unit of news, even as you get the rise of print, the rise of the newspaper, and that this kind of tagging remains an essential part of how news is communicated, that printed news will still tell you where the news was heard and how recently it was heard, that also it will build in this kind of skepticism about. We cannot yet assess whether this is true, we've heard it, but we can't guarantee it's truth. And we hope that it will be proved or disproved in a future edition. So that's really essential. And he's right that that's a way in which skepticism is built, in that people are sourcing the kinds of news that they get. The other thing that Raymond Rand talks about, and he looks at a couple of monumental collectors of news, where we've got kind of surviving archives of individual readers, and makes the point that even where these are extraordinarily readers of an extraordinarily diverse amount of news, they have a commitment to getting news from as many different sources as they can. So they subscribe to multiple newsletters. So you've got a Restoration England reader of news might pick up multiple newspapers or they would attend a coffee house where news sheets would be spread out on the tables for the price of a dish of coffee. They could read multiple different reports and perspectives. They might also subscribe to manuscript newsletters of events in the House of Commons, for instance. So you get people like Andrew Marvell writes one of these. So they're getting it from different sources as far as possible. Raymond's argument is that this does represent a kind of built in skepticism, that people are constantly comparing news against different sources. And I am charmed and often persuaded by this analysis. But as someone who spent too much of the 2,010s on a social media service where I was exposed to and had largely free access to the headlines and reporting of a wide, wide variety of news outlets, am I sure that it made me and my fellow Twitter users savvier consumers of news, or. I don't really think that the last few years can attest to that. I came of age really in media environments where, unlike my parents who took one or two newspapers, I had access to a much more I knew what the other side was saying and how they were saying it, and I could get it for free. I'm not sure that you could then look at the contemporary news landscape and say that that kind of radical availability of comparable perspectives or contrasting perspectives and reporting made for a healthier news infrastructure, or indeed made us a helpfully sceptical society of news consumers. So that's the worry that I have in the back of my head, is about what are the limits of that kind of exposure. And God knows that any number of early modern consumers of news were entirely entrenched in their own ideological positions. I'm not sure how many examples we have of people reading contrasting versions of the same story and thinking, I don't know that humans have ever been especially good at changing their minds. And I'm not sure or that we were in the 16th and 17th century either.

32:37

And what about deliberate attempts to mislead people? I mean, news that was fake in the sense that it was deliberate lies in order to mislead.

36:28

So there are a couple of great examples of this and one of them is where you get states attempting to control news output. So this is a period where you've got the London and Paris Gazettes which are state news organs. So there is very much a government hand in shaping what goes out. But you've also got. There's a great complaint made, I think by Peter the Great about the fact that they're not able to actually spread news from the centre effectively enough because people aren't reading the newspapers and the newspapers aren't getting into the right hands. So even if you might have this attempt to kind of shift the news from the center, it doesn't always work. And you do get attempts that are recounted in this period at spreading false news. There's a great example given in Raymond's book of the English diplomat and writer Henry Wotton. And Wotton is supposed to have kind of tried this attempt at what we today would call astroturfing, where he's got a group of people around him to go to the newsiest places in London. So places like St. Paul's places like the Royal Exchange, where you're going to hear places like Westminster, where there's a lot of kind of congregating to hear the latest news. And that he has attempted to have them spread fake news as a means of tracking its progression through the infrastructure. So when do you start getting this news repeated back to you? How effectively by putting the right people in the right place, can you control and shape information flows? And that's one of the anecdotes that gets told by people in this period. As a. These are countless as well. There are people saying you can't really trust trust news because let me tell you how it gets made. Someone puts the right word into the right ear. In a marketplace or a public square, there is a strong sense that news can be manipulated in a top down way by how it appears in something like the London Gazette, but also by bad actors taking these places like the piazza or the public square and shaping the news that comes from there, from the ground up. So that sense of, of false news and deliberately false news is there. Now Raymond is arguing as well that there is less of what corresponds to what we understand as being fake news today. And he says that one of the key characteristics of modern fake news is that it is not just designed to be false, it is also designed to confirm the prejudices of the reader. So it is news that is particularly massaged and constructed in order to reaffirm political positions and political biases. And Raymond argues that while there are attempts to spread false news in this period, one, that the skepticism is a bulwark against it, but also that it doesn't have this kind of self conscious truthiness to it that we expect in fake news today and that it doesn't play into the information ecosystem in the same way than it does in 2026.

36:37

And do you find that persuasive? I mean, presumably there would have been, I don't know, Protestants making up stories about Catholics, for example, which would feed into the prejudices of other Protestants hearing the news. And that idea that you're telling lies which confirm prejudice, that's not, I mean, that's not a new phenomenon, is it?

39:40

Yeah, I think there's, you know, something that's interesting in this period is to look at how stories spread across languages and across territories. And you know, Raymond is right that the paragraph does help to mitigate against things being too mutilated in transit. And there's lots of examples of news passing from place to place in relatively unmolested ways and kind of appearing in its original form very far from where it's originally told. But at the same time, you know, you can't lose sight of the fact that there's this whole infrastructure of news which is determinedly polemical. So whether that is in, as you say, in kind of the ballads that are sung in 16th century France around the French wars of religion, lambasting the crimes of Catholics or Protestants, depending on who's singing and who's listening, some of, you know, scurrilous singing from the kind of the benches of Venice that are kind of offering and you know, the authorities like to try and clamp down on this stuff, never wholly successfully. But offering polemical takes on contemporary news, that's still really important. Important you also get news cultures like that of later 17th century England, which are vituperative, which are reactive, which are personality led, where you get people like Roger Lestrange and Henry Carr tearing strips off each other in the press, but also issuing extremely personal insults against the purveyors of news. On the other side, you get all of this stuff around and the attempt to Exclude James Duke of York, who will become James ii from the succession. You get this incredibly polarized and really vituperative news culture which emerges, and it's hard to square that. You know, to what extent people believe themselves to be spreading fake news and to what extent people are wildly editorializing around material that they believe to be true is always hard to tell at a distance and frankly, is hard to tell on a social media feed today. But I think there is potentially more in common in those cultures, particularly at their extremes with the news culture we have today.

39:59

Were there also people in the past the equivalent of people who say they're going to unplug from social media, have a social media detox, as it were? There were people who felt that they needed to cancel their substack subscriptions and no more Avizi. I mean, was there a sense of sort of news overload and people saying, I can't enough?

42:04

Yes. So we already know through the work of Anne Blair and other people, we've got this idea of the early modern period as a period when there's too much to know, when information overload becomes a real problem. You can't possibly read all the books you want to read in a lifetime and you need to come up with systems to get around that. But we see a couple of examples of people complaining about news just in exactly this way. And I think I finished the review with this kind of glorious Italian, 17th century Italian print of a new seller who is just overflowing and is kind of holding news sheets and maps, but also they're stuffed into his boots, they're coming out of his clothing, he's got all of these and he's kind of trying to sell his news to a crowd. And you can see around him that one person has already left. You can just see their kind of boots in the corner of the image. Then this other person has stuck his fingers in his ears and says, no, no, no, I don't want to hear more news. And it's one of these kind of glorious representations of. Yeah, as you say, the desire to switch it all off and to pull back from news culture at a time, though, when you know, it reflects how hard it must have been to do that. You couldn't get away with, you know, if you were illiterate, there was someone to read you the news in the tavern or around the fire, something like that. We know that, you know, all of these things we might think of as barriers to getting news, whether it's distance from a metropole or inability to read or lack of context. But all of these things can get overcome and we've lots of examples of them doing so. So it must have seemed kind of regardless of where you were, that it was all getting too much and you too might have wanted to stick your fingers in your ears and say, no, no, no.

42:28

Yeah, Well, I hope we haven't been too much and that our listeners are not sticking their fingers in their ears. But John Gallagher, thank you very much.

44:03

Thanks so much.

44:10

You can read John's piece in the 19 February issue of the LRB, along with Seamus Perry's winter lecture on pluralism and Poetry, James Meek on the Romanian far right, Claire hall on Archimedes, and James Walcott on John Updike. The Alabi Podcast is produced by Anthony Wilkes and Zoe Kilbourne. The music is by Kieran Brunt. I'm Thomas Jones. Thank you for listening.

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