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…
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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…
Less than three months before the battle of Lepanto, famously won by the Holy League against the Turks on October 7, 1571 in the Gulf of Patras, passions in the Mediterranean are already running high. Bit by bit, the Venetian…
In the words of the Florentine resident, Amerigo Salvetti: “It is confirmed that on the 6th of this month this new tribunal of Westminster pronounced the death sentence against their king, and on the 9th had this carried out by…
Copies of newsletters exist throughout the archives, since handwritten newsletters were a business, whereby writers and scribes produced multiple exemplars for sending out to their lists of subscribers. Copies might be copied up in turn, by whoever wished to send…
Argentoratum, Argentina, Argentum, Argentaria, Argentoria, Strateburgis, Stradburgo (Strasburgensis, Straceburgensis), Straßburg (Elsaß, Alsace).Our handwritten newsletter from Argentina, (Archivio di Stato, Florence, MdP 4170, img 6531) is not from South America.But let’s take a closer look. We learn,“The five companies of Zurich…