By Brendan DooleyTrouble in Rome! The Rome newsletter of 23 October 1582 informs:“The Congregation responsible for the reform and intercalation of the year has heard from Naples about a serious error in the printed version, such that the pope having…
Year: 2021
By Gabor M. Toth and Brendan Dooley When studying a data set the very first step is a descriptive analysis. This is meant to get a quantitative overview of the data. A descriptive statistical analysis tells how skewed or balanced…
The digital study of early modern news culture involves a geographical layer. News were sent from one city to another; they were circulating in different geographical regions and spreading information about remote locations. In order to study the geographical layer…
Historians spend a lot of time trying to piece things together. Like Sherlock Holmes, in a famous analogy suggested by Carlo Ginzburg, they view assorted vaguely related clues and from these they derive possible hypotheses about how to put together…
by Davide Limatola The appearance of handwritten news sheets known as avvisi in Italian, circulating through the chanceries and streets of European cities, even before the invention of printed newspapers, raises several important questions. One of these is what were…
A small thing can represent something much bigger. That is in short the idea of microhistory. Even though the importance of a single event might be limited in size and direct implications, it can sometimes poignantly illustrate a phenomenon of…
When the newsletter breaks into verse, we must be in the court of the Sun King! There at least, or close by, is where this Paris newsletter originates, now conserved in Mediceo del Principato vol. 4891. The year is 1661…
Sometimes we find avvisi organized in the most curious ways. Consider this example from MdP 4891, beginning at fol. 1056r. On the left we have the first page of the writing, headed with “De Paris le 7e Mars 1661” (From…
The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis between France and Spain, leaving the latter power dominant in Italy after the decades-long Italian wars, was concluded on the 2nd and 3rd of April 1559. All that was left was to work out the details. …
“The mail from Milan which arrived on Thursday evening said that they burned one of the witches they had in jail, who among other nefarious deeds confessed to having perpetrated 150 homicides of little children.”An appalling indictment, described in this…