The EURONEWS project is about exploring the information connectedness of premodern European society by examining the regular circulation of news in a vast range of pre-newspaper networks. The manuscript newsletters in question are located largely in some 200 file folders in Florence. Researchers responsible for a selection of these will be working closely with the EURONEWS team, the State Archives in Florence, as well as the Medici Archive Project organization, to implement a systematic extraction method for making sense of the whole mass of documentation and connecting the dots in an expanding pattern of exchanges stretching from Florence to Warsaw, from Paris to Madrid, from the Netherlands to Britain, Ireland and the American colonies. Our ultimate goal, made feasible for the first time by current funding, is to reconstruct the fascinating news environment of an entire lost world, early modern Europe, at the birth of news.
Presentation by P.I. Brendan Dooley