International News Flows in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Prospects

We know quite a lot about the modalities of news transmission-diplomats, postal services, scholars, diasporic ethnic and religious communities, merchants and so on-yet, in spite of the evident promise of this Braudelian theme, we know less about the overall patterns of news transmission.The availability of new corpora and new approaches suggests new routes to discovery.Here I would like to examine what has been done and point out what could be done to trace the European news networks of early modern times using a combination of methodologies.An important tool for tracing news flows is the measurement of textual borrowing across media, i.e. the study of intertextuality on a massive scale.Another approach would be to compare the stylistic aspects of journalistic prose across several cultures.I shall give examples of both.Centering on the basic unit of news and showing its transformations, I attempt a preliminary picture of news flows.In a recent article in Annales Histoire Sciences Sociales, Will Slauter stated that although specialists know that the gazettes and journals of the early modern period contained mainly foreign news, the movement of this news across linguistic and political boundaries remains very little studied.As an example to the contrary he very kindly cited the recent volume published by the Bremen-based research group 'Culture and Exchange' , The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of 'Contemporaneity' in Early Modern Europe (2010).1But the work of that volume is very far from done.Indeed, the 1 Will Slauter, 'The Paragraph as Information Technology.How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World' ,