research papers on renaissance art

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Art and the Italian Renaissance

How did the Italian Renaissance shape the history of art and artistic collections? And what can re-examination of this period teach us about art today?

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most prolific artists that ever lived and a leading light of the Renaissance period. To celebrate the life of this Italian polymath, we have created a collection exploring the art and artistic legacy of his cultural milieu: Renaissance Italy

The papers below cover a broad spectrum of Renaissance art scholarship, from Classical revivals, to the works of Leonardo, to his spirit of innovation in digital scholarship. The collection is free to read online until 31st December 2019.

Oxford Art Journal

Titian's Fire: Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice Paul Hills

Renaissance Faciality Maria H. Loh

Leonardo and Allegory Joost Keizer

(Check) Mating the Grand Masters: The Gendered, Sexualized Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy Patricia Simons

Journal of Design History

Public Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano's De splendore (1498) and the Domestic Arts Evelyn Welch

Holes and Loops: The Display and Collection of Medals in Renaissance Italy Luke Syson

By Sale, By Gift: Aspects of the Resale and Bequest of Goods in Late-Sixteenth-Century Venice Jack Hinton

Dreams of Machines: Futurism and l'Esprit Nouveau Tim Benton

Journal of the History of Collections

The Museum: Its Classical Etymology And Renaissance Genealogy Paula Findlen

Roman antiquities and the emergence of Renaissance civic collections William Stenhouse

‘Indian’ objects in Medici and Austrian-Habsburg inventories: A case-study of the sixteenth-century term Jessica Keating and Lia Markey

Collecting in the garden: Inventories of casini in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Rome Lisa Neal Tice

British Journal of Aesthetics

Leonardo's Use Of Sfumato Helmut Ruhemann

The Leonardo Cartoon Peter Murray 

Alberti's ‘Hidden’ Theory Of Visual Art David Kipp

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

The Midas Touch? The Assets of Full-Text Retrieval Systems in Art History H. H. Mann

Bringing computing into the Middle Ages: the making of sybils!, a multimedia CD-ROM C. Garay and D. Walker

Beauty is truth: Multi-sensory input and the challenge of designing aesthetically pleasing digital resources Claire Warwick

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Renaissance Research Paper Topics

In this comprehensive page on Renaissance research paper topics , we delve into a captivating array of historical subjects that shaped one of the most transformative periods in human history. Within the following sections, we will present an extensive list of Renaissance research paper topics divided into 10 categories, explore the profound impact of the Renaissance on various aspects of society, and provide valuable insights on selecting and crafting exceptional research papers. As a bonus, we will showcase iResearchNet’s writing services, offering students the opportunity to unlock their full potential in academic excellence. Embrace the journey of rediscovering the Renaissance era through the lens of research and academic exploration.

100 Renaissance Research Paper Topics

The Renaissance period was a time of remarkable cultural, artistic, and intellectual growth, spanning from the 14th to the 17th century in Europe. It marked a significant shift from the medieval era to the modern age, reviving classical learning, embracing humanism, and unleashing a surge of creativity across various disciplines. Delving into the captivating realm of Renaissance history, we present a comprehensive list of research paper topics, organized into 10 categories, each capturing a unique facet of this transformative era.

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• Leonardo da Vinci: The Universal Genius and His Masterpieces
• Michelangelo’s David: A Symbol of Human Perfection
• The Sistine Chapel Ceiling: Unraveling the Symbolism
• Raphael’s School of Athens: Portrayal of Renaissance Philosophers
• Titian’s Venus of Urbino: Redefining Beauty in Art
• Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus: Reviving Classical Mythology
• Donatello and the Renaissance Sculptural Revolution
• Jan van Eyck and the Pioneering Techniques of Northern Renaissance Art
• Caravaggio: The Controversial Genius of Baroque Art
• Vermeer’s Mastery of Light and Shadows: The Girl with a Pearl Earring
• Dante Alighieri and The Divine Comedy: A Journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise
• Petrarch’s Sonnets: The Father of Humanism and Modern Love Poetry
• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Window into Medieval and Renaissance England
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Tragic Hero in a Changing World
• Machiavelli’s The Prince: A Political Handbook for Rulers
• Montaigne’s Essays: Personal Reflections in a Time of Intellectual Transition
• Cervantes’ Don Quixote: Satire and the Birth of the Modern Novel
• Sir Thomas More’s Utopia: An Exploration of Ideal Societies
• Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel: Satire, Humanism, and Social Critique
• John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Religious Epic in a Time of Religious Turmoil
• Copernicus and the Heliocentric Model: Challenging the Geocentric Universe
• Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion: Revolutionizing Astronomy
• Galileo’s Observations and the Telescope: Advancements in Science and Technology
• Vesalius and the Fabric of the Human Body: A New Understanding of Anatomy
• Harvey’s Circulation of Blood: Groundbreaking Discoveries in Physiology
• Bacon’s Scientific Method: The Empirical Approach to Knowledge
• Newton’s Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation: The Foundation of Modern Physics
• The Invention of the Printing Press: Revolutionizing Communication and Education
• The Exploration and Mapping of New Worlds: The Age of Discovery
• The Renaissance Impact on Navigational Techniques and Cartography
• The Renaissance Papacy: The Influence of the Church on Politics and Culture
• The Medici Family: Patrons of the Arts and Political Power in Renaissance Florence
• The Tudor Dynasty: Consolidating Power in England during the Renaissance
• The Habsburg Dynasty: European Politics and Diplomacy in the Renaissance
• The Holy Roman Empire: Challenges and Transformations in the Renaissance
• The Ottoman Empire: Expansion and Cultural Exchange during the Renaissance
• The Role of Women in Renaissance Politics: From Queens to Noblewomen
• The Rise of City-States: Venice, Genoa, and the Renaissance Maritime Republics
• The Thirty Years’ War: Religious Conflicts and Political Realignment in Europe
• The Peace of Westphalia: Redefining State Sovereignty and International Relations
• The Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther and the Ninety-Five Theses
• The Counter-Reformation: The Catholic Church’s Response to Protestantism
• The Council of Trent: Reaffirming Catholic Doctrines and Addressing Corruption
• Erasmus and Humanist Theology: The Quest for Religious Reform from Within
• Savonarola and the Bonfire of the Vanities: Religious Zeal and Cultural Destruction
• The Spanish Inquisition: Religious Persecution and the Quest for Orthodoxy
• The Anabaptist Movement: Radical Reformers in the Early Modern Period
• The Impact of the Reformation on Art and Iconography: From Religious to Secular Themes
• The Printing Press and the Spread of Religious Ideas: Dissemination of Reformist Writings
• The Edict of Nantes: Religious Tolerance and the Challenges of Coexistence
• Humanism and the Rediscovery of Ancient Learning: The Renaissance Intellectual Revolution
• The Influence of Classical Greek and Roman Philosophy on Renaissance Thought
• Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man: Human Potential and Freedom
• Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Astronomer, and Heretic in the Renaissance
• The Impact of Stoicism and Epicureanism on Renaissance Ethics
• Renaissance Neoplatonism: The Search for Spiritual Unity and Harmony
• The Debate on Free Will and Predestination in Renaissance Theology and Philosophy
• The Skepticism of Michel de Montaigne: Questioning Truth and Knowledge
• Machiavelli and Political Realism: The Pragmatic Approach to Politics
• Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: Utopian Vision and the Advancement of Knowledge
• Palestrina and the Renaissance Polyphony: Sacred Music in the Catholic Church
• The Advent of Opera: Monteverdi and the Birth of a New Art Form
• Josquin des Prez: Master of Renaissance Choral Music
• The Influence of Renaissance Music on Later Baroque Composers
• Orlando di Lasso: The International Composer of the Renaissance
• Gabrieli and the Venetian School: Innovations in Instrumental Music
• The Development of Musical Notation in the Renaissance
• Thomas Tallis and William Byrd: English Renaissance Composers
• Secular Music in the Renaissance: Madrigals, Chansons, and Villancicos
• Music Patronage in the Renaissance: The Role of Courts and Noble Families
• Filippo Brunelleschi and the Dome of Florence Cathedral: Engineering Marvel of the Renaissance
• Andrea Palladio: The Architect of the Venetian Renaissance
• The Medici Villas: Harmonizing Nature and Architecture in Renaissance Tuscany
• St. Peter’s Basilica: Michelangelo’s Architectural Legacy in Rome
• The Influence of Islamic Architecture on Renaissance Europe
• The Renaissance Garden: Artistic Expression in Landscape Design
• The Development of Perspective in Renaissance Painting and Architecture
• The Influence of Renaissance Architecture on Later Periods
• The Renaissance Palaces: Symbol of Power and Prestige
• The Evolution of Renaissance Urban Planning and Design
• The Elizabethan Theater: Shakespeare and the Golden Age of English Drama
• The Globe Theater: An Iconic Venue for Renaissance Theatrical Performances
• Christopher Marlowe: The Tragic Dramatist of the Elizabethan Era
• Commedia dell’Arte: The Italian Renaissance Improvisational Comedy
• The Role of Women in Renaissance Theater: Actresses and Playwrights
• Seneca’s Influence on Renaissance Tragedy: From Rome to the English Stage
• The Impact of Renaissance Drama on Society and Culture
• Renaissance Theater Costumes and Stagecraft: Enhancing the Theatrical Experience
• Moral Themes and Allegory in Renaissance Drama
• Renaissance Theater and the Exploration of Human Nature
• The Renaissance Court: Intrigue, Politics, and Cultural Patronage
• Education and Humanism in Renaissance Europe: The Rise of the Educated Elite
• The Role of Women in Renaissance Society: From Queens to Commoners
• The Renaissance Feast: Culinary Arts and Social Gatherings
• The Development of Banking and Finance in Renaissance Italy
• Renaissance Fashion and Clothing: Style, Status, and Symbolism
• The Printing Revolution and the Dissemination of Knowledge in Renaissance Europe
• Renaissance Medicine and Healthcare: Advancements and Superstitions
• The Renaissance Impact on Family Life and Marriage
• Renaissance Travel and Exploration: Journeys of Discovery and Exchange

Delve into the enchanting world of the Renaissance era through these captivating research paper topics, each offering a unique perspective on one of the most transformative periods in human history. As you embark on your academic journey, may these subjects inspire your exploration and contribute to a deeper understanding of the remarkable achievements and complexities of the Renaissance. The road to intellectual discovery awaits you, as you uncover the rich tapestry of cultural, artistic, and intellectual growth that shaped the course of history.

Renaissance: Exploring the Revival of Knowledge and Creativity

The Renaissance, a remarkable period spanning from the 14th to the 17th century, marked a profound intellectual, cultural, and artistic awakening in Europe. It emerged as a response to the challenges and transformations brought about by the Middle Ages, bringing forth a renewed interest in the classical works of ancient Greece and Rome. This revival of knowledge and creativity laid the foundation for the modern world, shaping the course of history and leaving a lasting impact on various aspects of human civilization.

Rediscovering the Past

The Renaissance was characterized by a fervent desire to rediscover and emulate the achievements of classical antiquity. Scholars and intellectuals sought to study and preserve the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors, including philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and poets like Homer and Virgil. The translation and dissemination of classical texts were instrumental in spreading ancient wisdom and sparking intellectual curiosity across Europe.

Humanism and the Celebration of Human Potential

At the core of the Renaissance was humanism, an intellectual movement that emphasized the value and potential of the individual. Humanists believed in the power of reason and sought to develop human capabilities in various fields, including literature, art, science, and politics. They promoted education and sought to create well-rounded individuals, known as the “Renaissance man” or “Renaissance woman,” who could excel in multiple areas of knowledge and expertise.

Artistic Renaissance and the Mastery of Realism

The Renaissance witnessed a flourishing of art, with artists exploring new techniques and styles to depict the world with unprecedented realism. This period saw the emergence of legendary artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, who brought forth a level of detail and skill that had not been seen since the classical era. Their masterpieces captured the essence of the human form, as well as the beauty of the natural world.

Patronage and the Medici Influence

The support of wealthy patrons, notably the Medici family in Florence, played a crucial role in the flourishing of the arts during the Renaissance. These patrons sponsored artists, architects, and scholars, providing them with the resources and opportunities to create their finest works. The Medici, in particular, were influential in nurturing artistic talent and promoting cultural exchange.

Scientific Advancements and the Pursuit of Knowledge

The Renaissance also witnessed significant advancements in the field of science. Pioneering minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler challenged the geocentric model of the universe and proposed the heliocentric model, which placed the Sun at the center of the solar system. These breakthroughs laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution that would follow in the centuries ahead.

Literary and Linguistic Achievements

In addition to the revival of classical literature, the Renaissance also witnessed the development of vernacular languages, such as Italian, English, French, and Spanish, as literary languages. Writers like Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Miguel de Cervantes contributed to the elevation of their respective languages through their literary works, such as “The Divine Comedy,” “The Canterbury Tales,” and “Don Quixote.”

Religious Reformation and the Impact on Art and Thought

The Renaissance coincided with the Protestant Reformation, led by figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin. This movement challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and led to religious conflicts across Europe. The impact of the Reformation on art and thought was profound, with artists and intellectuals grappling with questions of faith, morality, and individual spirituality.

Scientific Method and the Empirical Approach:

The Renaissance saw the emergence of the scientific method, an approach to inquiry that relied on observation, experimentation, and evidence-based reasoning. This marked a departure from the reliance on ancient authorities and paved the way for modern scientific inquiry, laying the foundation for the Age of Enlightenment.

Architecture and Urban Planning

Renaissance architects, inspired by the classical orders and principles of ancient Roman architecture, designed magnificent structures, including cathedrals, palaces, and public buildings. The era also witnessed advancements in urban planning, resulting in the creation of elegant cities and well-designed public spaces.

Legacy of the Renaissance

The legacy of the Renaissance continues to reverberate throughout the centuries, leaving an indelible mark on human history. Its impact on art, science, literature, philosophy, and politics laid the groundwork for the subsequent periods of intellectual and cultural growth, shaping the modern world we inhabit today.

The Renaissance, a time of intellectual and creative rebirth, remains a source of fascination and inspiration for scholars and history enthusiasts alike. The revival of knowledge, the celebration of human potential, and the pursuit of artistic excellence during this period continue to captivate our imagination and remind us of the enduring power of human ingenuity. As we explore the rich tapestry of the Renaissance, we gain a deeper understanding of the profound transformations that shaped the course of history and continue to influence our lives today.

How to Choose Renaissance Research Paper Topics

Selecting the right research paper topic is a crucial step in the academic journey, especially when delving into the vast and fascinating world of the Renaissance. With such a diverse and influential period in history, choosing a research paper topic can be both exciting and overwhelming. To assist you in this process, we have compiled a comprehensive guide with ten tips to help you navigate through the myriad of possibilities and select a compelling and engaging Renaissance research paper topic.

• Understand the Renaissance Period : Before choosing a research paper topic, it is essential to develop a solid understanding of the Renaissance period. Familiarize yourself with the historical context, major events, key figures, and prevailing cultural, intellectual, and artistic trends. This foundational knowledge will provide you with a broader perspective to identify specific areas of interest for your research.
• Identify Your Area of Interest : The Renaissance covers a wide range of subjects, including art, literature, science, politics, religion, philosophy, and more. Determine your area of interest and identify topics that resonate with you personally. Choosing a topic that captivates your curiosity will make the research process more enjoyable and productive.
• Narrow Down Your Topic : The Renaissance is a vast and multi-faceted period, so it is crucial to narrow down your research topic. Rather than attempting to cover the entire Renaissance, focus on a specific aspect, individual, city, or theme within the period. For example, you could explore the impact of the Renaissance on a particular region, such as Renaissance Florence or Renaissance England.
• Consult Secondary Sources : Conduct preliminary research using secondary sources, such as books, academic journals, and reputable websites. Secondary sources will provide you with insights into the existing scholarship on various Renaissance topics, helping you identify gaps in the research and potential areas for exploration.
• Formulate a Research Question : Once you have identified your area of interest, develop a clear and concise research question. A well-defined research question will guide your investigation and provide a focus for your paper. Make sure your research question is specific, relevant, and open to exploration.
• Consider Primary Sources : Incorporating primary sources in your research is essential for delving deeper into the historical context and gaining a firsthand perspective. Primary sources may include letters, diaries, artwork, speeches, and other contemporary materials. Accessing and analyzing these sources will enhance the authenticity and credibility of your research.
• Evaluate the Feasibility of Your Topic : Consider the availability of resources and the feasibility of conducting research on your chosen topic. Ensure that there is sufficient information and materials available to support your investigation. If your topic is too obscure or lacks credible sources, it may be challenging to develop a comprehensive research paper.
• Consult with Your Instructor or Advisor : Seeking guidance from your instructor or academic advisor can be valuable in refining your research paper topic. They can provide valuable feedback, suggest additional resources, and offer insights into potential research avenues.
• Stay Open to Revision : As you delve deeper into your research, be open to revising your research topic if necessary. You may discover new information or angles that lead you to modify your focus. Flexibility is key to ensuring your research paper evolves organically and addresses significant aspects of the Renaissance.
• Be Passionate and Curious : Ultimately, the most successful research paper topics are born out of passion and curiosity. Choose a topic that ignites your enthusiasm, as your passion for the subject will drive you to explore it thoroughly and produce an exceptional research paper.

Selecting a Renaissance research paper topic requires a careful balance of curiosity, knowledge, and focus. By understanding the period, identifying your interests, and formulating a specific research question, you can narrow down your options and choose a captivating topic that will engage readers and showcase your academic prowess. Embrace the opportunity to explore the rich and transformative era of the Renaissance, and let your research paper unveil the profound impact it had on the course of human history.

How to Write a Renaissance Research Paper

Writing a research paper on the Renaissance is an exciting endeavor that allows you to explore a period of history marked by a profound revival of art, culture, and knowledge. As you embark on this academic journey, it is essential to approach the writing process with a systematic and thoughtful approach. In this section, we will guide you through the steps to craft a well-structured and compelling Renaissance research paper.

• Conduct In-Depth Research : Before diving into the writing process, conduct thorough research on your chosen topic. Utilize both primary and secondary sources to gather relevant information and gain a comprehensive understanding of the Renaissance era. Take notes and organize your research material to streamline the writing process later.
• Develop a Strong Thesis Statement : Your thesis statement is the backbone of your research paper. It should present the main argument or point of your paper in a clear and concise manner. A strong thesis statement will provide direction to your writing and help readers understand the purpose of your research.
• Create an Outline : Organize your research and ideas into a well-structured outline. An outline serves as a roadmap for your paper, helping you arrange your thoughts logically and ensure a smooth flow of information. Divide your paper into sections and subsections, each supporting a specific aspect of your thesis.
• Introduction : Begin your research paper with an engaging introduction that provides context to the Renaissance era and presents your thesis statement. Hook your readers with a captivating opening and offer a brief overview of what they can expect from your paper.
• Provide Historical Context : In the introduction or early sections of your paper, provide the necessary historical context for readers who may not be familiar with the Renaissance. Highlight the key developments, events, and influential figures that characterize this period.
• Use Proper Citation and Referencing : When citing sources and referencing historical materials, adhere to the citation style specified by your instructor, such as APA, MLA, or Chicago/Turabian. Accurate and consistent citation ensures the credibility and authenticity of your research.
• Analyze Primary Sources : If your research includes primary sources from the Renaissance, analyze them critically. Offer insights into the significance of these materials and their relevance to your research topic. Use direct quotes or paraphrasing to support your arguments.
• Present Clear Arguments and Evidence : Each section of your research paper should present clear arguments supported by relevant evidence. Analyze your research findings and draw connections between different aspects of the Renaissance to strengthen your arguments.
• Address Counterarguments : Acknowledge and address potential counterarguments to your thesis. By engaging with opposing viewpoints, you demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the topic and present a more well-rounded research paper.
• Provide Critical Analysis : In addition to presenting information, offer critical analysis of the Renaissance era and its impact on society, art, politics, and culture. Demonstrate your ability to evaluate historical developments and draw meaningful conclusions from your research.
• Conclusion : Summarize the key points of your research and restate your thesis in the conclusion. Offer insights into the significance of your findings and how they contribute to the broader understanding of the Renaissance period.
• Revise and Edit : After completing the first draft, take time to revise and edit your research paper. Review the content for clarity, coherence, and accuracy. Check for grammatical errors, typos, and formatting issues. Consider seeking feedback from peers or instructors to gain different perspectives.
• Embrace Your Voice and Style : While adhering to academic conventions, let your unique voice and style shine through in your writing. Engaging and passionate writing will captivate your readers and make your research paper more enjoyable to read.

Writing a Renaissance research paper is a rewarding experience that allows you to explore the rich and transformative era of history. By conducting thorough research, developing a strong thesis, and presenting clear arguments supported by evidence, you can create an exceptional research paper that sheds light on the Renaissance’s enduring impact on human civilization. Embrace the opportunity to delve into this extraordinary period and let your passion for history shine in your writing.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section European Tapestries

Introduction, general studies.

• Designs and Designers
• Production, Weavers, and Entrepreneurs
• Patronage, Collecting, and Display
• Collection Catalogues
• Tapestry Conservation

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European Tapestries by Lorraine Karafel LAST REVIEWED: 28 July 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 28 July 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0467

Tapestry, the most costly and coveted art form in Renaissance and Baroque Europe, has long fascinated scholars. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, researchers delved into archival sources and studied extant tapestries to produce sweeping introductions to the medium. The study of tapestry, however, fell outside mainstream art history, with tapestry too often seen as a less important “decorative art” rather than a “fine art.” , Also, tapestry did not fit easily into an art history that prioritized one master, as the making of a set of large-scale tapestries required a team of collaborators, including the designer, cartoon painters, and weavers, as well as a producer/entrepreneur and, often, a patron. Scholarship on European tapestries in the Early Modern period, nevertheless, flourished. By the late 20th century art historians turned attention to the “decorative arts” and tapestry specialists produced exciting new research illuminating aspects of design, production, and patronage, as well as tapestry’s crucial role in the larger narrative of art and cultural history. In 2002, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition and catalogue, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence , spotlighted the art form, introduced it to a broad audience, and brought new understanding of tapestry as art. A sequel, the Met’s 2007 exhibition and catalogue, Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor , followed. Other major museums presented ambitious exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues with substantial new research. In addition, from the late 20th century, institutions have produced complete catalogues of their extraordinary European tapestry holdings, among them: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Patrimonio Nacional in Spain; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. At the same time, articles and books exploring specific designs, designers, producers, and patrons appeared, with some monographs published in the dedicated series, Studies in Western Tapestry, edited by leading scholars Guy Delmarcel and Koenraad Brosens, and produced by Brepols. Tapestry research has often focused on the works of well-known designers and their exceptionally innovative work, such as the artists Raphael (b. 1483–d. 1520) or Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577–d. 1640). High-quality production at major centers, including Brussels or at the Gobelins Manufactory in France, has also captured scholars’ attention, as have important patrons, among them Henry VIII of England (b. 1491–d. 1547) or Louis XIV of France (b. 1638–d. 1715). Newer directions for research include the contributions of women as weavers and entrepreneurs, the practice of reweaving designs, and the international reach and appeal of Renaissance and Baroque tapestry beyond Europe.

Overviews of European tapestry, based on archival sources and analyses of surviving weavings, have appeared since the late 19th century ( Guiffrey, et al. 1878–1885 ; Göbel 1923–1934 ; Joubert, et al. 1995 ). Some studies have focused on specific weaving centers and regions, such as Flanders, the center of European tapestry weaving ( Wauters 1878 , Delmarcel 1999 ). Campbell’s groundbreaking catalogues for two exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offer a comprehensive and original look at European Renaissance and Baroque tapestry, synthesizing important research and offering cogent analyses of some of the most innovative designs and spectacular weavings produced in the period ( Campbell 2002 , Campbell 2007 ). Essays by Campbell ( Campbell 1993 ), Cleland ( Cleland 2007 ) and Brosens ( Brosens 2013 ) present concise, informative introductions to European tapestry in the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Bertrand, Pascal-François, ed. Arachné: Histoire de l’histoire de la tapisserie et des arts décoratifs . Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France: Éditions Esthétiques du Divers, 2016.

This collection of papers by tapestry historians explores the history of the study of tapestry, from the 19th century—when tapestry became perceived as a less important “decorative art” versus the more important “fine arts” of painting and sculpture—to the early 21st century, as scholars now aim to place tapestry in the larger context of art history.

Brosens, Koenraad. “Tapestry: Luxurious Art, Collaborative Industry.” In A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art . Edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow, 295–315. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

DOI: 10.1002/9781118391488.ch14

This essay offers a thoughtful overview of European tapestry design and production from 1380 to 1750, particularly in France and the Low Countries. The author presents tapestry as a costly pictorial art form, parallel to but very different from painting. Through specific projects, the discussion traces two main themes: how tapestry design responded to stylistic changes in contemporary painting and shifting methods of tapestry distribution—from smaller scale merchant capitalism to the more ambitious industrial capitalism.

Campbell, Thomas P. “Tapestry.” In 5000 Years of Textiles . Edited by Jennifer Harris, 188–198. London: British Museum, 1993.

This short, very informative essay introduces European tapestry design, production, and collecting in the 14th to 19th centuries with special attention to weavings made in France, Flanders, and England.

Campbell, Thomas P., ed. Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007.

The scholarly catalogue of the 2007 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that explores European tapestry from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries. Essays by leading specialists discuss design, production, patronage, and collecting; catalogue entries offer in-depth discussions of specific works from the period.

Campbell, Thomas P., Maryan W. Ainsworth, Rotroaud Bauer, et al. Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002.

The scholarly catalogue of the ground-breaking 2002 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that brought new attention to tapestry as integral to the narrative of art history surveys of European tapestry from the late 15th to the late 16th centuries. Essays by Campbell present aspects of design, production, and patronage, and catalogue entries, with contributions by international scholars, detail outstanding examples of the art.

Cleland, Elizabeth. “Tapestries as a Transnational Artistic Commodity.” In Locating Renaissance Art . Vol. 2. Edited by Carol M. Richardson, 103–132. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

A concise introduction to European tapestries in the 15th and 16th centuries that highlights Brussels as a major center of production and discusses the supply, marketing, and appeal of these luxury textiles.

Delmarcel, Guy. Flemish Tapestry . London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.

This survey by an eminent tapestry historian presents tapestry design and production in Flanders, the center of the most highly skilled and innovative weaving throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The author discusses the importance of Brussels, but also considers tapestry making in Tournai, Antwerp, Bruges, Enghien, and Oudenaarde.

Göbel, Heinrich. Die Wandteppiche . 3 vols. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1923–1934.

An early-20th-century introduction to European large-scale wall tapestries that is particularly useful for discussions and images of tapestry in Germanic and Scandinavian regions that remain understudied.

Guiffrey, Jules, Eugène Müntz, and Alexandre Pinchart. Histoire générale de la tapisserie . 3 vols. Paris: Société Anonyme de Publications Périodiques, 1878–1885.

This important, early survey of the history of European tapestry draws on archival sources and extant examples and continues to offer valuable information.

Joubert, Fabienne, Amaury Lefébure, and Pascal-François Bertrand. Histoire de la Tapisserie en Europe, du Moyen Âge à nos jours . Paris: Flammarion, 1995.

This volume presents a broad history of tapestry in Europe, especially France, and offers a thoughtful introduction to the art through the 20th century.

Wauters, Alphonse. Les tapisseries bruxelloises: Essai historique sur les tapisseries et les tapisseries de haute et de basse-lice de Bruxelles . Brussels: Baertsoen, 1878.

An early study of tapestry in Brussels, the leading center of tapestry production from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and its relation to tapestry production in other centers, written by the archivist of the city of Brussels.

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• Iter Italicum This online version of Paul Oskar Kristeller's Iter Italicum contains descriptive listings of uncataloged Renaissance manuscripts. The manuscripts can be searched by geographic location, library and description keywords.
• Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes Ce programme a pour objectif de fournir dans les quatre ans qui viennent environ 2000 ouvrages des XVIe-XVIIe sièc les provenant des fonds patrimoniaux régionaux, avec l'espoir d'en proposer au moins 10% en mode texte, le reste étant accessible, en ligne et gratuitement, par une numérisation image de qualité. more... less... La réalisation a commencé par un travail d'inventaire des ressources régionales, pour établir une liste rationnelle des ouvrages prioritaires: la numérisation a commencé par une sélection d'ouvrages présents dans les bibliothèques de Tours (CESR, fond Brunot de la Bibliothèque universitaire, Bibliothèque Municipale) et la campagne de numérisation est désormais engagée avec les autres partenaires après signature d'une convention. Il s'agit également d'effectuer des recherches sur l'optimisation des données numériques (mode image et mode texte), pour développer les logiciels de structuration de la page (AGORA), de reconnaissance de caractères (RETRO) pour mettre en place une base de données associant des textes en mode image et des ouvrages entièrement en mode texte avec lemmatisation et outils statistiques, consultables et interrogeables en ligne avec une interface ergonomique et publique.
• Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance This Dictionary covers all aspects of history, society and culture in 14th to 17th century Europe. more... less... This Dictionary covers all aspects of history, society and culture in 14th to 17th century Europe.
• Traditio Classicorum The following pages contain a bibliography of secondary literature concerning the fortuna of classical authors to the year 1650.
• Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400-c. 1650 The Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy Database is a searchable catalogue of Aristotelian works written or published in Italian between 1400 and 1650. The census covers both manuscript and printed sources preserved in libraries in Italy, other European countries and the US.
• Italian Renaissance Learning Resources Free resource on Italian Renaissance art available from Oxford University Press and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, generously supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. It features eight units on different themes of Italian Renaissance art, each with well-illustrated essays written by NGA staff, primary source documents, discussion questions, classroom activities, and glossary terms and biographies excerpted from Grove Art Online entries.

Working tools for Renaissance texts

• Database of Latin Dictionaries The Database of Latin Dictionaries (DLD) provides access to a growing number of Latin dictionaries. The database will comprise three kinds of dictionaries: * Dictionaries to assist translation from Latin into modern languages (English, French, German, and other) * Dictionaries providing semantic and etymological explanations in Latin of Latin words * Historical Latin dictionaries The Database of Latin Dictionaries is linked to the Library of Latin Texts (CLCLT), permitting to search on a word in a dictionary within the DLD and to identify actual occurrences of the word within its context in the CLCLT and vice versa. more... less... The Database of Latin Dictionaries (DLD) provides access to a growing number of Latin dictionaries. The database will comprise three kinds of dictionaries: ##Dictionaries to assist translation from Latin into modern languages (English, French, German, and other) ##Dictionaries providing semantic and etymological explanations in Latin of Latin words ##Historical Latin dictionaries ## ##The Database of Latin Dictionaries is linked to the Library of Latin Texts (CLCLT), permitting to search on a word in a dictionary within the DLD and to identify actual occurrences of the word within its context in the CLCLT and vice versa.
• Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis Le Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, initialement publié par Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange (1610-1688), est un glossaire du latin médiéval, en latin moderne.
• Cappelli dictionary of Latin abbreviations online A. Cappelli, Dizionario di abbreviature Latini ed Italiani, Milano 1912.
• Abbreviationes (Latin abbreviations)
• Enigma - Déchiffrer les mots latins difficiles dans les manuscrits médiévaux Enigma est destiné à faciliter la lecture des mots latins difficiles à déchiffrer dans les manuscrits.
• In Principio In Principio features over 1 million incipits, covering Latin literature from its origins to the Renaissance. It is an inevitable research tool for those scholars and libraries interested in the writers, texts and manuscripts of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Coverage: Latin Literature from its origins to the Renaissance more... less... hits
• Scriptores Possessoresque Codicum Medii Aevi Database of mediaeval manuscripts' scribes and owners. The database is integrated with the "Scriptores codicum medii aevi". The information on each scribe or owner of a manuscript includes: name; short biographical data with city of origin and birth and death dates; libraries holding manuscript(s); references to secondary literature. more... less... Scriptores Possessoresque Codicum Medii Aevi
• Watermark databases Watermarks in manuscripts and incunables. From the International Association of Paper Historians.
• Piccard watermark collection

Bibliographies & Indices

• Oxford Bibliographies - British and Irish Literature Renaissance + Reformation studies more... less... As a key part of Western literary and cultural history, British and Irish literature encompasses a massive range of periods, authors, and works. This area of study invites trans-disciplinary collaboration with fields as varied as history, cultural studies, political science, and philosophy making it challenging for students and scholars to stay informed about every applicable area.
• Iter Bibliography The Iter Bibliography covers Medieval and Renaissance Studies literature and contains over 1 million citations for journal articles, essays, books, discographies and dissertation abstracts. Coverage: Varies with the material; indexes journals published since 1794. more... less... The Iter Bibliography covers Medieval and Renaissance Studies literature and contains over 1 million citations for journal articles, essays, books, discographies and dissertation abstracts.
• An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Texts The enormous profusion of literary texts posted on the World Wide Web will no doubt strike future historians as remarkable and important. But this profusion brings with it an urgent need for many specialized on-line bibliographies. The present one is an analytic bibliography of Latin texts written during the Renaissance and later that are freely available to the general public on the Web. more... less... This site is an analytic bibliography of Latin texts written during the Renaissance and later that are freely available to the general public on the Web.
• Nuovo Rinascimento (Danilo Romei) "La Banca Dati Telematica "Nuovo Rinascimento" accoglie testi elettronici di opere di autori italiani, saggi, bibliografie, materiali didattici e materiali informatici in generale, pertinenti alla storia e all'attualità della letteratura e della cultura italiana."
• I Tatti Renaissance Library

The I Tatti Renaissance Library is the only series that makes available to a broad readership the major literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific works of the Italian Renaissance written in Latin. Each volume provides a reliable Latin text together with an accurate, readable English translation on facing pages, accompanied by an editor's introduction, notes on the text, brief bibliography, and index.

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These internet resources provide access to information, digitized materials, and digital image collections relating to the Renaissance.

• Art History Resources on the Web: Renaissance Art in Italy A gateway to images and information on Italian Renaissance art and artists from an eclectic selection of online resources.
• Digital Archives of the Polo Museale Fiorentino This resource features eight databases created to provide access to the artworks and historical collections of Florentine galleries. Current databases include a catalog and inventory of artworks, a photograph archive, a historical archive, a hymnals archive, an archive of artworks damage during the flood, the Carocci archive, the Medici treasures project, and the Euploos project.
• Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Created by the Metropolitan Museum of art, this resource includes timelines, thematic essays, and illustrative examples of artwork from the museum collection.
• The Medici Archive Project This documentary sources database provides access to 200 volumes of documents from the Medici Granducal Archive (Archivio Mediceo del Principato). Documents include letters and biographical records of the Medici Family from 1537-1743. Keyword search, or select document groups based on topic including "Art Collecting" and "Painting."
• Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance Includes historical overviews, short artist biographies and and image gallery.
• Timeline of Art History: European Art in the Renaissance Devoloped by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this timeline uses the museum's collections to illustrate Renaissance art history chronologically, geographically, and thematically. Includes entries for European Renaissance figures, concepts, and places as well as timelines, maps, thematic essays, and further readings.
• Universal Leonardo Explore the Leonardo Da Vinci's life and times through his drawings, paintings, manuscripts and inventions available for browsing in this resource created by the University of the Arts, London
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Article contents

Literature and news in the renaissance.

• Kirsty Rolfe Kirsty Rolfe Humanities, Leiden University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1319
• Published online: 24 February 2022

The news culture of early modern England was complex and shifting: news moved via printed and manuscript texts, sometimes over wide distances and across national and confessional borders. “News” might cover a range of topics, from “high politics” and reports of military action, to grisly “true crime,” prodigies, and natural disasters—and even to the scandalous doings of one’s neighbors. News was (and is) difficult to delineate as a genre, slipping into gossip, rumor, propaganda, and history. England’s news market—especially its printed news market—changed markedly in the years before the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and this was reflected in literary texts. Authors drew on topical events; they mocked and satirized figures associated with news dissemination and consumption, and they drew on the processes by which newsreaders acquired and evaluated information.

• information
• early modern drama

What (Is) News?

“What news” is a commonplace greeting in early modern literature and culture, so common that it is joked about. As a “letter from Aleppo” in William Biddulph’s The Travels of Certaine Englishmen ( 1609 ) has it, “the nature of man is desirous of newes, and (as it is said) the first question of an Englishman, What newes? .” 1 The question turns up in foreign language dictionaries and in sample dialogues in language learning guides: one of the first questions in Gotthard Arthus’s Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages ( 1614 ) is “What newes? have you heard nothing of the comming of any ship?,” with the reply, “I heard the thundering of Ordnance, which is a signe of ships comming.” 2 Richard Perceval’s A Spanish Grammar ( 1599 ) contains the following exchange, rendered in English and in Spanish:

F. Heere comes little Guzman, let us see what newes hee brings. Hoe Guzman what newes? G. Many things, the Turke (as they say) is become a Moore or infidell, Venice swims in water, & Italie is full of people, and that in France there are more then a hundred thousand men of armes, and also they say in secret, that the Earle of Flaunders hath lien with the Queene of Spaine. F. Is there all this newes? G. These newes came now with this poste. F. Farre fetched lies come from farre. G. That which I have told you is as true as it is now day light. 3

Perceval’s dialogue reflects several crucial things about attitudes to news in early modern England: that it was desired by people, that it was passed between people, that it might travel long distances by messenger or postal service, that it might carry information (albeit, in this case, rather pointless news: Venice was, of course, well known to “swim in water”) about far-flung places, and that it might well be untrue. 4

“Newes” in early modern English was multiple—“news reports”—and took multiple interconnected forms. News might travel through oral report, through personal letters (sociable, scholarly, diplomatic, or mercantile) or professionally produced manuscript gazettes, or through printed texts (such as prose broadsheets, ballads, or quarto pamphlets). It was unfixed and mutable, often moving between these forms. 5 Drawing on continental models, English newsmongers produced composite news texts in print and in manuscript, made up of multiple letters or paragraphs of news obtained from different sources, which had been translated, reframed, and recombined as they traveled. News cropped up, sometimes controversially, in sermons and devotional literature. It might even be conveyed wordlessly, through the sound of church bells or the use of alarums in a play.

What sort of information qualified as news—what was newsworthy— is just as tricky to pin down. “News” was and is a slippery, amorphous concept, and the word does not always mean the same thing to different people or even across the same text. “At an ideational level,” Jenni Hyde writes, “news is itself a construct, being simply what someone chooses to tell another person.” 6 Hyde’s working definition of news is helpfully broad:

Sixteenth-century news might [. . .] be defined as the broadcast or reporting of interesting events and information considered to be novel, relevant to contemporary society and/or worthy of discussion, in whatever way it was transmitted. Consumers may have believed information to be noteworthy because it could affect them in some way, or simply because they had an interest in gossip and rumour. Perhaps it just became newsworthy by the act of being passed by one person to another. 7

Topics of early modern news ranged from salacious tales of “true crime” to accounts of natural disasters, miracles, monsters, and portents: to reports of battles, dynastic marriages, religious disputes, and political machinations. News reports and texts might themselves become news by being notably scandalous, entertaining, or challenging to authority; they might implicate those who wrote, retailed, circulated, or consumed them in topical events. What was news and what was “gossip” or “rumor” was not easily delineated: news might be defined by being particularly credible or serious, but the term itself is wide enough to encompass topics ranging from “high politics” to local scandal and untruths as well as certainties.

News is, by definition, novel. In the early modern period, old news was often derided as “stale,” tasteless, and worthless. Novelty is contingent, however. It depends on what those receiving it know already and on their expectations of the networks they had access to. International news in particular might take considerable time to travel to London and from there to move out via domestic networks to individual consumers. News from outside of Europe might take months or even years to reach England. For example, the trial and execution of twenty-one English merchants by officials of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Amboyna (Ambon) in Indonesia took place in February 1623 , but news of it didn’t reach the Netherlands and England until May 1624 . 8 The delays built into news networks—and their potential fragility, for example, in times of plague—might bring with them anxieties: what might have happened since the news was dispatched? What might be happening now? Serialized news appealed to these anxieties with promises that the next publication would clarify confusions and that consumers could access a continuing narrative through which news would reach them eventually. However, knowledge of “current” events (in the strictest sense of the term) remained frustratingly out of reach, perpetually deferred to an unreachable future moment. 9

News is novel, but news is, of course, past , and so the boundaries between news and history are porous ones, especially when it comes to events from preceding decades and events whose effects could still be felt and/or which might be seen to have contemporary relevance. The boundary between news and history is a movable, porous one. Another genre with which news intersects is propaganda: news might be circulated in order to persuade its consumers to particular points of view—its political import might well be a major factor in its interest to consumers—and might include commentary interpreting it according to specific political positions.

In other words, news as a concept gets muddier the closer you get to it. Should information only be counted as news when it is the first time an individual has encountered it, or does news include communication that clarifies, restates, reframes, repeats, offers opinion, propagandizes, insults, entertains? For example, does a play or a ballad performance that deals with a topical event count as news when it functions primarily as entertainment rather than a means by which its audience learns topical information? What if this information is not true and not presented as truth—what if it is fictionalized and “personated” upon a stage? What if it is used to attack one’s enemies? And how might we account for the varieties of audience, reader, and interlocutor experience, for different levels of knowledge, different expectations, and different attitudes to news?

News in a fairly broad sense might be said to interact with “literature”—also in a rather broad sense—in four overlapping ways. The first is in terms of “news texts” themselves, the letters, pamphlets, performances, printed ballads that carried the news and conveyed it to readers and auditors. While these might not always be considered “literary” works, they are certainly subject to literary analysis, and the language and forms of address and staging they use are both notable in themselves and influential for other forms of writing and performance. Secondly, news entered literary texts in terms of topical reference: most strikingly, in plays that represented topical foreign and domestic news. Thirdly, some early modern writers—most famously Ben Jonson—turned to the developing culture of news (and the places and people associated with it) in order to satirize fashionable newsgathering as idle, deceptive, and perhaps even politically suspect. Lastly, and most subtly, literary texts might draw on or represent the processes of news circulation and consumption, in particular awareness (and judgment) of international and domestic news networks and methods of evaluating (and misevaluating) the credibility of the news one received.

News Texts in Early Modern England

Placing boundaries around what might be considered a news text in early modern England is a difficult task. News might be delivered by oral report or performance, by personal or professional letters, by professional manuscript newsletter, or by a slew of printed texts—ballad sheets, prose broadsheets, quarto pamphlets—that were marked as generically news. Beyond these, there is, of course, a wide and varied hinterland of early modern texts that deal with the news: from printed sermons and devotional texts that touch on and wrangle over topical matters (and it is worth noting that sermons as delivered might well include more topical matter than the version that was printed), to poems that celebrate and mourn topical events, to polemical texts that call for peace or war, persecution, or tolerance. In this section, I focus on texts that claim to deliver news and outline how they developed in late 16th - and early 17th-century England and the effects these developments had on contemporary news culture.

International News Networks

News is “essentially connective and dynamic,” linking those who read or heard it to other places and people, sometimes over great geographical and temporal distances. 10 It is this connectivity that, for Joad Raymond, constitutes news: individual news publications “exist at the end of a network” and should be considered “epiphenomena” rather than “the thing itself”; news is a process (or, rather, multiple interrelated processes) of informational mobility. 11 Chiara Palazzo notes the ways in which this connectivity might shape awareness of and feelings of connection to the wider world: “the circulation of news implies contacts, awareness of different realities, geographical and cultural reference points, the development of the collective imagination.” 12 The relationships news formed and reflected might be multiple and (as the work of numerous scholars demonstrates) they might cross significant distances. 13 International news traveled between cities via various networks: primarily along postal routes, but also via the movements of merchants, scholars, diplomats, and other travelers. 14 It moved in reports and/or paragraphs, which were translated, reformed, and recombined along the way. Early modern England—prior to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, at least—consumed far more news than it produced; relatively little English news flowed back over the sea to mainland Europe. 15

News gathered in entrepôts: well-connected cities such as Venice, Vienna, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Antwerp in which textual and professional networks converged. News entrepôts were home to communities of those who processed the news: scribes, printers, translators, postal workers, ballad singers, and varied and nebulous crowds of people who shared and discussed spoken news. They were where news consumers might look for news, not just of the entrepôt and its surrounding area, but of places beyond it. Venice, for example, was where news from the Ottoman and Safavid empires entered Europe and also a source (via its connections to communities of Venetian merchants in places like Damascus and Aleppo) for news from Africa. English readers interested in news from the battlefields of Germany during the Thirty Years’ War looked toward the news entrepôts of the Netherlands and through them to Frankfurt and Vienna. Manuscript and printed paragraphs of foreign news carried with them traces of some of the entrepôts they passed through, often in headings listing where the news was sourced from and the date of the communication(s) that carried it. 16 Such “metadata” contributed to “the development of the collective imagination,” in Palazzo’s terms: to the sense of interacting with international textual and informational networks and of being connected to far-flung people and events. 17 Those who consumed news might even get a sense of the “news topography” of cities they had never visited: “What news on the Rialto?,” several characters ask in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice , testifying to awareness that the city’s famous covered bridge was (along with St Mark’s Square) a key area for the exchange of mercantile and political news. 18

The media by which news moved were varied and interconnected and developed in key ways through the 16th and 17th centuries . 19 Professional anonymous manuscript newsletters, known as avvisi or gazettes, developed in the 16th century . 20 Printed news serials—including the semiannual Latin Mercurius Gallobelgicus —developed in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain in the 1600s and 1610s. 21 Meanwhile, there was a long-standing European tradition of news ballads, often performed by singers in urban settings. These too often moved into print, in forms that supplemented but (for many, at least) did not replace oral performances. 22

News Publication in England

The early modern period saw marked changes in the way news was published and marketed in England, especially in print. Prior to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the majority of printed political news in England—in particular, printed pamphlets—dealt with foreign news. The lack of printed domestic news from the period has led to the perception that this was prohibited, but no evidence of a ban survives, and some revisionist historians of news and censorship have argued from this that the lack in fact reflects not a prohibition but an absence of interest on the part of consumers. However, in his discussion of the historiography of early modern print censorship, Joad Raymond points out that the existing archival record cannot be taken to represent “a full and sufficient account of what happened” and that a ban on printing domestic news might have been recorded in the “Red Book” containing the Stationers’ Company’s 1562 Ordinances, now lost. 23 Raymond argues for “a more complex history” of print censorship, “one constrained by a mixture of laws, social norms, and anxiety” in which petitions to print foreign news should be understood as evidence of an implicit prohibition, if not necessarily an explicit one, on printing news about domestic politics. 24

At any rate, prior to the 1640s, most printed English news dealt with events (in particular, military ones) outside of the kingdom. The 1580s and 1590s saw increasing numbers of printed news publications—both broadsheet ballads and quarto pamphlets—dealing with foreign news, especially regarding the wars in France and the Low Countries. 25 One especially notable development came in the early 1620s in response to conflict in the Holy Roman Empire (the early years of what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War). Dutch publishers began to export serialized broadsheets of international military and political news in English—known as “corantos”—to London booksellers. 26 These were soon joined by English-printed serialized news texts, first in broadsheet and later in quarto pamphlet form, sold on a somewhat erratic but more or less weekly schedule (I use the term “news pamphlets” to distinguish these publications from broadsheet corantos, but “corantos” was used for both forms by many contemporary readers). 27 The most prominent of these were produced by a shifting “syndicate” (in Folke Dahl’s term) of booksellers, including (in various combinations) Nicholas Bourne, Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer, Bartholomew Downes, William Sheffard, and Nathaniel Newbery. Butter became especially associated with the retail of serialized news. 28 These publications were controversial: several stationers were punished for their early experiments in them, and printed newsbooks were prohibited by a Privy Council decree in 1632 . This prohibition continued until 1638 , after which Butter published news sporadically and unprofitably, with Bourne and then on his own, until 1642 . 29

While pre-1640s printed news texts rarely carried domestic political news, this did circulate both orally and in manuscript (both in personal and professional letters and in manuscript “separates” conveying, for example, proceedings in Parliament or trial reports). Alexander Bellany has traced the circulation of news and comment about the 1613 murder of Sir Thomas Overbury through oral report, letters, and manuscript separates. 30 Other domestic news did make it into print as pamphlets and ballads which dealt with grisly crimes, disasters and portents, and remarkable natural or supernatural events; events might be reported in both ballad and pamphlet form. These texts indicated their genre in their titles, not always—and, at least after the 1620s, not usually—with the word “news,” but with an array of terms stressing the movement of information (many of which drew on terms used elsewhere in European news networks): “occurrences, transactions, proceedings, passages, affairs, relations, intelligence, informations, and, of course, mercury and gazette.” 31

News and London

England was fairly peripheral to international news networks in the early modern period. However, London might still be considered a news entrepôt, at least for news moving within the British archipelago. The capital’s centrality to governance, trade, banking, and legal education—and, crucially, to the production of both printed and manuscript texts—meant that, for most people throughout England and Wales, London was where one looked for news. News moved out through the archipelago in various interconnected forms: through sociable letters, paid-for manuscript news services, printed news texts purchased from regional booksellers or chapmen, or forwarded from London booksellers, and oral news received from travelers arriving from London. 32

Within London, as within Venice, particular areas and landmarks became associated with news. In Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (first performed in 1626 ), the newsmonger Cymbal assigns a newsgatherer to each of the “four cardinal quarters” for the exchange of news in and around London: the Royal Exchange and St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City, and the court and Westminster Hall in neighboring Westminster. 33 Cymbal’s “Staple” is a clearinghouse in which the city’s news is collected and “vent[ed] as occasion serves,” and his staffing choices reflect a keen understanding of the city’s news topography. 34 The forms of news that could be obtained from these places were various and overlapped with one another. Court news and news about English politics could be sourced from Westminster and more “public” (or, at least, more publishable) news from the City. The Royal Exchange was—like similar locations such as Amsterdam’s Bourse—a gathering place for merchants and those involved in international finance, and thus a good place to gather news that arrived through mercantile networks. The middle aisle of St. Paul’s was well-known as a place where men of various ranks and occupations “walked” together in the late morning and afternoon, sharing news and seeking employment. Fittingly, Cymbal’s newsgatherer in St. Paul’s is “Master Ambler, [. . .] A fine-paced gentleman as you shall see walk|The middle aisle.” 35 The neighboring churchyard was the center of the city’s print trade, and became especially associated with news through the activities of Nathaniel Butter, whose shop (the Pied Bull) stood in the southeast corner of St. Paul’s churchyard, near St. Austin’s Gate. The early 1620s “syndicate” of news publishers, and the collaboration between Butter and Nicholas Bourne that continued through the decade, can be seen to offer a similar form of “coverage” to Cymbal’s Staple (and, indeed, Jonson’s play satirizes Butter in particular, although Cymbal’s news is “vented” in manuscript). Aside from Butter and Bartholomew Downes (whose shop was to the west, near Fleet Bridge), most of the syndicate had shops near the Royal Exchange; Bourne’s stood at the main (south) entrance of the Exchange, on Cornhill. 36 The syndicate thus covered two of the “cardinall quarters,” exploiting both the fact that news could be obtained from the crowds that gathered there and the fact that news could be sold to them, too. Early modern London’s news topography was exploited by those who sought and sold news, and by those who brought news onto the stage and into satire.

News and Literature

Topical fictions.

Topicality was as key to the early modern textual marketplace, and to public discourse, as it is to the 21st-century one. In particular, we can think of it as essential to early modern England’s multiple, overlapping “performance cultures.” An early modern person might encounter news through the use of topical reference in a sermon, or through hearing a ballad singer, or by attending a play that dealt with recent history, or even ongoing events. 37

The boundary between news and history is an extremely permeable one; this is especially evident in literary and historical texts that deal with the early modern period’s many lengthy conflicts. The 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was fictionalized in Anne Dowriche’s 1589 poem The French Historie and Christopher Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris ( 1593 ); in both cases, an event from years ago was mobilized to speak to an ongoing conflict and to contemporary domestic religious and political concerns. George Chapman’s series of plays on French politics— Bussy D’Ambois ( 1607 ), the two parts of Charles, Duke of Byron ( 1608 ), The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois ( 1613 ), and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France ( c. after 1611 ; published 1639 )—all dealt with events from relatively recent history; the two parts of Byron , in particular, drew on A General Inventory of the History of France ( 1607 ) by Chapman’s cousin, Edward Grimeston, and represented the life and death of Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, executed in 1602 . The relative topicality of Chapman’s Byron plays prompted controversy: the French ambassador objected to the first part and attempted to have the play banned, and it was published with controversial scenes removed. 38

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt was even more topical. It staged the trial and execution of the Dutch politician Johan van Oldenbarnevelt and was performed only three months after van Oldenbarnevelt’s death. Fletcher and Massinger’s play was censored—albeit in a fairly minor manner—by both the Master of the Revels and the Bishop of London. 39 More controversial was Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (first performed in August 1624 ), which satirized contemporary Anglo-Spanish politics and—as Lena Steveker has argued—engaged closely with the 1620s news market. 40 Middleton’s play proved extremely popular: it was performed at the Globe for an unprecedented nine consecutive days before being suppressed by order of the Privy Council following a complaint by the Spanish Ambassador. Middleton went into hiding, his son was arrested, and it is likely that Middleton himself was imprisoned for a time in the Fleet. The play itself became international news: “[a]ccounts of it were dispatched to Brussels, The Hague, Madrid, Florence, Rome, and Venice.” 41

A close relationship between the news market and professional theater can also be seen in a number of plays that catered to English interest in overseas travel, trade, diplomacy, and crime—and, in particular, with the Islamic world. The battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco in 1578 —particularly notable for English audiences for the death of Sebastian I of Portugal, which prompted the Spanish annexation of the entire Iberian peninsula—was represented in two plays, both centering on the English mercenary Thomas Stukeley: The Battle of Alcazar , ascribed to George Peele ( c. 1588 , first published 1594 ), and the anonymous The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley ( c. 1596 ). 42 Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk ( 1612 ) recounted the conversion of the English pirate John Ward (Yusuf Raïs) to Islam around 1608 . Daborne’s depiction of Ward was based on two 1609 pamphlets: Andrew Barker’s A True and Certaine Report of the Beginning, Proceedings, Overthrowes, and now Present Estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker, the Two Late Famous Pirates From Their First Setting Foorth to this Present Time , and the anonymous Newes From Sea, of Two Notorious Pyrats Ward the Englishman, and Danseker the Dutchman With a True Relation of All or the Most Piraces [ sic ] by Them Committed unto the Sixt of Aprill 1609 . 43 Both of these publications might be considered news texts: each flag their “newsworthiness” in their titles (“True and Certaine Report,” “Newes from Sea,” “True Relation”), each stress their topicality (they cover Ward’s exploits up until “this Present Time,” or “the Sixt of Aprill 1609 ”), and Newes from Sea was printed for Nathaniel Butter, later to become the most prominent publisher of serialized news. Daborne reworked news texts that were a few years old; “stale” news became new again through being staged. The Travels of the Three English Brothers ( 1607 ), by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, staged adventures based on those of the travelers and diplomats Anthony, Thomas, and Robert Sherley. The play was commissioned by Thomas Sherley as part of (in Jonathan Burton’s words) a 1607 “public relations campaign” that also included the publication of a pamphlet by Anthony Nixon, The Three English Brothers . 44 The staging of topical stories could be a way to influence (or, at least, to attempt to influence) popular opinion.

Sensational domestic news also found its way onto the stage. The 1605 trial and execution of Walter Calverley for the murder of his children and attempted murder of his wife was reported in printed news texts. Nathaniel Butter published a pamphlet in June (while Calverley’s trial was ongoing) and another after his execution in August, while Thomas Pavier published a ballad. 45 In succeeding years, the story formed the basis of two plays: George Wilkins’ Miseries of Enforced Marriage ( 1607 ) and The Yorkshire Tragedy (anonymous, attributed on its title page to William Shakespeare but now thought to be by Thomas Middleton) of 1608 , which addressed its chronological relationship to its source material in its subtitle, “not so new as lamentable and true.” 46

More newsworthy—in chronological terms—were two plays focusing on notorious trials for witchcraft. The Witch of Edmonton , by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, was published in 1658 , but first performed in 1621 (there is a record of a performance at court on December 29, but it was probably played at the Cockpit in London earlier in the year). It staged the story of Elizabeth Sawyer, a woman tried for witchcraft and executed on April 19, 1621 . Soon after Sawyer’s death, a pamphlet by the churchman Henry Goodcole was published, which recounted her trial and prison confession; the playwrights drew on this extensively. 47 The Witches of Lancashire , by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was first staged by the King’s Men at the Globe sometime between August 11 and August 13, 1634 —as we know from an account of it by Nathaniel Tomkyns, dated August 16—and published as The Late Lancashire Witches later in the year. The title used for the printed text distinguishes these Lancashire witches from earlier ones, this being the second witchcraft scandal to center around the small Lancashire community of Pendle. 48 However, it also stresses the recency of the events it represents. The performances in the summer of 1634 took place while four of the women accused of witchcraft—Frances Dicconson, Jennet Hargreaves, Margaret Johnson, and Mary Spencer—were in London for examination by a medical team headed by William Harvey, the king’s physician. The women were imprisoned at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, only a few miles down the river from the theater where crowds gathered to see them represented. 49 Tomkyns judged the play “full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible,” but wrote that it “passeth for a merry and excellent new play,” both for its entertainment value and “in respect of the newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here).” 50 The play is bookended with references to its own topicality. The Prologue begins

Corantoes failing, and no footpost late Possessing us with news of foreign state, No accidents abroad worthy relation Arriving here, we are forced from our own nation To ground the scene that’s now in agitation, The project unto many here well known: Those witches the fat jailor brought to town. 51

Heywood and Brome make reference to the lack of serialized foreign news pamphlets following the 1632 Privy Council decree banning their publication. Bereft of “news of foreign state” through lack of both printed news and news brought by messenger (“footpost”), the playwrights are (apparently) “forced” to turn to domestic events for topical content to stage. The fact that the women’s case had not yet concluded is referenced in the Epilogue, where it is noted that “What their crime|May bring upon ‘em, ripeness yet of time|Has not revealed,” and that “What of their story further shall ensue,|We must refer to time, ourselves to you.” 52 The women were, in fact, eventually acquitted by their London examiners and returned to Lancashire where, despite their acquittal, they remained in prison for several years. Herbert Berry (the discoverer of Tomkyns’ account) has argued that Heywood and Brome’s use of interrogation records may indicate that they were commissioned by the Privy Council to write a play making the case for the prosecution, a reading that Alison Findlay supports. 53 However, Helen Ostovich (the play’s most recent editor) warns against discounting the importance of “scepticism” in the play and its “critiques of credulity,” and Charlotte A. Coffin has explored the ambivalence with which governmental and judicial authority is treated within the play and the additions Heywood and Brome made to their sources. 54 Coffin stressed that “[t]he play does not just illustrate a contemporary case but incorporates its protagonists in a recognizable world of fiction and dramatic patterns,” with the “unmistakable consequence [. . .] that it fictionalizes the supposedly real witches. Or perhaps more accurately, it reveals their fictive status.” 55 Coffin’s argument is a useful corrective to the temptation to see topical plays as in some way documentary. Topical plays incorporate news into their plots, and in doing so, can be seen to distort it, to bend it to fictive purposes, or, as Coffin argues, to raise questions about truth and representation, about power, and about legal and governmental fictions.

News and Satire

News also turns up in literary texts that mock and satirize both it and the people who engage in its circulation. The genre of the satirical “character sketch”—modeled on the satires of Theophrastus—became especially fashionable in the late 16th and early 17th centuries , and both “character books” and writers that drew on this genre often featured “characters” in part defined by their obsession with news. 56 The anecdote from Percevall with which I started sits in a tradition of mocking those who mis-consume news: both those who (like “little Guzman”) take bland statements that are neither “new” nor interesting to be news, and those who gullibly believe untruths. Perhaps the most famous example of a gullible newsreader in early modern literature is Sir Politic Would-Be in Ben Jonson’s Volpone , whose interest in the news and desire to be seen as a statesman make him an easy mark for deception. 57

Meanwhile—according to satirists, at least—unscrupulous newsmongers were only too happy to provide their customers with unreliable news. The anonymous Horae Subsecivae ( 1620 ) satirizes an “affected Statist” who “will translate the very Gazzette , the most ordinarie and uncertaine newes in the World, to send over by whole bundles into England.” 58 Printed news in particular was stigmatized as untrue. In Ben Jonson’s masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (performed at court on January 12, 1621 ), a “Printer” declares that he will “give anything for a good copy now, be’t true or false, so’t be news.” 59 Jonson developed his satire of news in The Staple of News ( 1626 ), in which the newsmonger Cymbal founds a clearinghouse in which his “Emissaries” gather and process news from the various “news centers” of London. This news is, however, ludicrous: it includes reports of “an invisible eel” with which the Dutch plan to sink the Spanish fleet at Dunkirk. 60 Like the Printer in Jonson’s earlier masque (and even though the news they retail is oral and in manuscript), these newsmongers don’t care about whether their news is true, but about whether it will be attractive to customers. Punning on Nathaniel Butter’s resonant name, Abraham Holland leveled an accusation of falsity at printed news sourced at Paul’s: “behold the wals|Butter’d with weekely Newes compos’d in Pauls,|By some Decaied Captaine” (the “Captaine” being the editor of Butter’s pamphlets, the ex-soldier Thomas Gainsford). 61 Jonson’s Cymbal also references Butter, accusing “Mercurius Britannicus” (the name under which Butter and Bourne published their pamphlets from January 1625 ) of passing off old news as new by “buttering over again [. . .] His antiquated pamphlets.” 62

News-seeking was also satirized as idle and frivolous, a distraction from work and worship. Robert Burton mocks the idle gentry, aligning newsreading and news-seeking with other fashionable and unprofitable entertainment: “If they read on a book at any time, t’is an English Chronicle, S r Huon of Burdeaux , Amadis de Gaul &c . a play-book, or some pamphlet of Newes, & that at such times only, when they cannot stir abroad, to drive away time, their sole discours is dogs, hawks and horses, and what newes?.” 63 John Earle goes beyond accusations of idleness, and connects news-seeking to transgressive sexuality, describing Paul’s Walk as “the eares Brothell, [which] satisfies their lust, and ytch.” 64 A similar connection is made by the malcontented Malevole (the disguised Altofronto, deposed Duke of Genoa) in John Marston’s The Malcontent ( c. 1603 ), who replies to the question “what’s the common news abroad?” (asked by his usurper, Pietro) with “Common news? Why, common words are ‘God save ye,’ ‘Fare ye well’; common actions, flattery and cosenage; common things, women and cuckolds.” 65 Malevole replies to the “wrong” part of Pietro’s question, picking up “common” rather than “news” and listing things that are familiar—greetings, deception and flattery, and female sexual misbehavior. The reference to “women and cuckolds” also brings in another sense of “common.” Women (in Malevole’s misogynist terms) are “common” both in the sense that there are plenty of them about, and in the sense that they are sexually available to multiple men. As Ruth Mazo Karras has explained, “‘common woman’ in England expressed the [. . .] idea of a woman who moved into the communal realm, becoming sexually available.” 66

At the same time, “common” brings in a class dimension: news is shared among the common people as well as those with high social or political status, becoming matter of “common fame.” 67 News might be exchanged in public, lower-class spaces like taverns and (in a stereotype that crossed Europe) barbershops. John Taylor mocks the exchange of news “[a]t Ordinaries, and at Barbers shopps,” where (inaccurate) “tydings vented are, as thick as hopps.” 68 Satirists dwelt on the idea that news, democratized in this fashion, might end up in the hands, ears, and speech of those who did not have the necessary knowledge or intelligence to deal with it. John Smith mocked news consumers who extrapolate from news reports to “proportion Kingdomes, Cities, and Lordships, that never durst adventure to see them”; these newsgatherers “can neither shift Sun nor Moone, nor say their Compasse,” but they “will tell you of more than all the world, betwixt the Exchange , Pauls and Westminster : so it be newes, it matters not what, that will passe currant when truth must be stayed with an army of conceits.” 69

News Processes

The processes of acquiring and interpreting news meant that early modern people cultivated (to varying levels of detail and accuracy) knowledge of how it moved, of the places and languages it might pass through, and (as in relation to London) of the locations, forms, and even the people most associated with it. 70 This knowledge, and the methods by which one might acquire and practice it, is one of the more nuanced ways in which news appears in literary texts. For example, understanding of the centrality of Venice to European news networks is reflected in Shakespeare’s two “Venetian” plays— The Merchant of Venice ( c. 1596–1599 ) and Othello ( c. 1603 )—which are both deeply concerned with the movement and interpretation of information and misinformation. In The Merchant of Venice , characters ask each other for news on numerous occasions, and there are several prominent references to one of the city’s most famous “news locations.” Shylock describes his understanding of Antonio’s mercantile ventures as something he has heard “upon the Rialto,” the same public location where, we soon learn, Antonio has previously upbraided him for usury and subjected him to antisemitic abuse. 71 This space of public discourse, mercantilism, and conflict is also where news is shared: Solanio’s “Now, what news on the Rialto?” at the start of act 3, scene 1 prompts Salerio to reveal to him—and to the audience—that Antonio’s ship has been lost. 72

Othello is especially concerned with interpreting the news: with the skills required to assess truth or falsity within news reports. David Randall has argued for the development during the early modern period of multiple methods of assessing credibility in news texts, which interact with each other and allow readers to judge the likelihood of the different kinds of report they receive. “Intensive” and “sociable” forms of newsreading establish credibility through interpreting details of accounts (such as claims to be eyewitness reports) and the reputations of named writers. “Extensive newsreading”—a later development—is the comparison of “numerous essentially partisan and flawed reports” by which “a newsreader could come up with his own judgement of the actual, credible truth out of his flawed sources.” 73 Act 1, scene 2 of Othello stages an instance of this sort of comparative newsreading at a governmental level as the Venetian council of war receives first a report that the Turkish fleet is heading to Rhodes rather than to attack Cyprus. The First Senator’s assessment that this is “a pageant|To keep us in false gaze” is based on detailed knowledge of Turkish tactics and quickly proved correct when a report arrives describing how the fleet has joined with reinforcements there and now heads toward Cyprus. 74

This measured, comparative treatment of information contrasts, of course, with Othello’s treatment of Iago’s falsehoods. Othello goes through some of the motions of responsible newsreading but does so poorly and inconsistently. He assesses Iago’s reports according to the latter’s reputation for honesty, applying the “sociable” standard of credibility, but neglects to apply the same standard to Desdemona. He interprets them not in the light of his own knowledge, but of his paranoia and misogyny. He corroborates them through external “proof,” both aural and “ocular,” but in both cases his interpretation is directed by Iago. Othello fails in what Noah Millstone calls “seeing like a statesman”: he allows himself to be taken in by information that is “cooked: manufactured by actors specifically to make the truth more difficult to discern.” 75 Millstone’s model is specifically political—he argued for a prevalent early modern belief that information might be manipulated by political agents, and thus that early modern readers learned to interpret with “politic” skepticism—and so, judged according to it, Othello’s failure is twofold: his failure to assess information correctly in the domestic realm is a damning indictment of his ability to operate in the political one. Reading Othello’s informational failures in relation to early modern “news culture” is one example of how the skills and processes of early modern newsreading might be brought to bear on literary texts.

Discussion of the Literature

The development and processes of news in the early modern period and the movement of news texts over the wide distances of early modern Europe have been the focus of much influential work. This builds on a long history of scholarship on early modern English news, most notably the pioneering bibliographical work of Folke Dahl, undertaken from the 1930s to the 1950s. As the titles of Matthias A. Shaaber’s Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England ( 1929 ) and Joseph Frank’s The Beginnings of the English Newspaper ( 1961 ) indicate, much 20th-century work on early modern English news took a fairly teleological approach, concentrating on how recognizably “modern” features of news media (in particular, serialization, regularity, and stable titles) emerged.

More work has addressed features of early modern news texts, with greater focus on how they function within their historical, social, professional, economic, material, and linguistic contexts, and has moved away from nation-focused histories of news media to stress the international formation and movements of news and its forms. Despite its title, Joad Raymond’s The Invention of the Newspaper concentrates on how 1640s newsbooks developed within their print, political, economic, and literary contexts; Raymond’s work on news, which includes Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain ( 2003 ), a number of influential edited collections, and a forthcoming monograph on news culture in Europe, has been very influential on the field—as has the work of Andrew Pettegree, most notably The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself ( 2014 ).

The field has also been shaped by a number of edited volumes—many of them published as part of the Brill “Handpress World” series, with Pettegree as the General Editor. These have included News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain ( 1999 ) and News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe ( 2006 ), both edited by Joad Raymond; The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe ( 2001 ) and The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe ( 2010 ), both edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron; Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 ( 2013 ), edited by S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington; News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections ( 2014 ), edited by Simon Davies and Puck Fletcher; and News Networks in Early Modern Europe ( 2016 ), edited by Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, which provides a particularly useful guide to the contours of the field across Europe.

There are also a number of major projects which trace the movements of news across early modern Europe: for example, the Fuggerzeitungen project (in particular the digital mapping of news texts undertaken by Nikolaus Schobesberger), the work of Brendan Dooley and others to map the movements of translated news through texts held in a large number of European archives (as part of the project “Culture and Exchange: Recreating the Communication Networks of Early Modern Europe”), and “The Birth of News,” a project to transcribe and research avvisi held at the Medici Archive in Florence, also directed by Dooley. Work on international and domestic epistolary networks, such as that undertaken on the letters of Samuel Hartlib and Jan Amos Comenius as part of the “Cultures of Knowledge” project at the University of Oxford, also adds to our understanding of how texts moved across wide distances.

Scholars have also examined the movement of news within particular communities, especially urban ones. David Coast’s News and Rumour in Jacobean England ( 2014 ) focuses on news and court politics, while Filippo de Vivo ( 2007 ) and Rosa Salzberg ( 2014 ) have examined news in Venice, and Paul Arblaster ( 2014 ) has traced how news moved and was published in the Habsburg Netherlands. Jayne E. E. Boys ( 2011 ) has examined how London news publishers responded to the Thirty Years’ War.

News ballads are an especially vibrant area of early 21st-century research by scholars attentive both to the movements of news and to nuances of performance and sound. Angela J. McShane’s Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography ( 2011 ), Jenni Hyde’s Singing the News ( 2018 ), and Una McIlvenna’s forthcoming monograph on ballads that carry news of crime and execution all testify to a growing interest in news ballads as multiuse—and multivocal—texts.

Links to Digital Materials

Early Modern News Texts

• UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive
• Broadside Ballads Online (University of Oxford)
• Early English Books Online (Text Creation Partnership)
• Early Modern Letters Online
• Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters
• George Thomason’s Newsbooks (1649–61)
• Richard Brome Online

European News Networks

• Culture and Exchange: Recreating the Communication Networks of Early Modern Europe
• The Medici Archive Project
• The Fuggerzeitungen Project

Further Reading

• Arblaster, Paul . From Ghent to Aix: How They Brought the News in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1550–1700 . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014.
• Baars, Rosanne M. Rumours of Revolt: Civil War and the Emergence of a Transnational News Culture in France and the Netherlands, 1561–1598 . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021.
• Barker, S. K. , and Brenda M. Hosington . Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain , 1473–1640 . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013.
• Barnard, John , and D. F. McKenzie . The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. 4: 1557–1695 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Behringer, Wolfgang . Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Neuzeit . Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003.
• Bellany, Alexander . The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Bethencourt, Francisco , and Florike Egmond , eds. Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, III, Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe 1400–1700 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Boys, Jayne E. E. London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War . Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2011.
• Brownlees, Nicholas . The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England . Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.
• Clegg, Cyndia Susan . Press Censorship in Caroline England . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Coast, David . News and Rumour in Jacobean England: Information, Court Politics and Diplomacy, 1618–25 , Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014.
• Dahl, Folke . A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642 . London: The Bibliographical Society, 1952.
• Davies, Simon , and Puck Fletcher , eds. News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014.
• Dooley, Brendan , and Sabrina A. Baron , eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe . London: Routledge, 2001.
• Dooley, Brendan , and Sabrina A. Baron , eds. The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe . Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010.
• Fox, Adam . Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Frank, Joseph . The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–1660 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.
• Halasz, Alexandra . The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Hyde, Jenni . Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England . Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018.
• Kirwan, Richard , and Sophie Mullins , eds. Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015.
• McShane, Angela J. Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography . London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011.
• Millstone, Noah . Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Pettegree, Andrew . The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
• Randall, David . Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News . London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008.
• Raymond, Joad . The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Raymond, Joad . Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Raymond, Joad , ed. News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain . London: Frank Cass, 1999.
• Raymond, Joad , ed. News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe . London: Routledge, 2006.
• Raymond, Joad , ed. The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture Vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Raymond, Joad , and Noah Moxham , eds. News Networks in Early Modern Europe . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2016.
• Salzberg, Rosa . Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice . Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014.
• Shaaber, Matthias A. Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476–1622 . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929.
• Sommerville, C. John . The News Revolution in England: The Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• de Vivo, Filippo . Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• der Weduwen, Arthur . Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century, 1618–1700 , 2 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017.

1. William Biddulph, The Travels of Certaine Englishmen (London, 1609), G1r. Biddulph’s joke might reflect an English sense that their countrymen were notably nosy. William Rankins writes that “it may be thought that England [. . .] hath brought more awaie, and pondered better of their neighbours newes, then any corner of all Christendom, besides” ( The English Ape, the Italian Imitation, the Footesteppes of Fraunce [London: 1588], B1v), and when Thomas Nashe’s narrator meets the devilish “knight of the post” in Pierce Penilesse (1592), he questions his interlocutor about hell with “‘an Englishmans appetite to enquire of news” (I3r).

2. Gotthard Arthus, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane Languages (London, 1614), A3r.

3. Richard Percevall, A Spanish Grammar (London, 1599), N3v-4r.

4. Percevall drives home the pointlessness of Guzman’s “news” with a note in the margin: Venice “[s]tands built upon the sea, the sea compassing it round about” (N3v).

5. S. K. Barker, “‘Newes Lately Come’: European News Books in English Translation,” in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 , ed. S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 227–244 ; Joad Raymond, “News,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture Vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 , ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 377–397 . There are a number of recent and current research projects tracing the movement of news: see Nikolaus Schobesberger, “Mapping the Fuggerzeitungen : The Geographical Issues of an Information Network,” in News Networks in Early Modern Europe , ed. Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2016; hereafter NNEME ), 216–240 ; Brendan Dooley, “International News Flows in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Prospects,” in NNEME , 158–177.

6. Jenni Hyde, Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 107 .

7. Hyde, Singing the News , 108.

8. See Alison Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 77–78; Alison Games, “Violence on the Fringes: The Virginia (1622) and Amboyna (1623) Massacres,” History 99, no. 3.336 (2014): 505–529.

9. See Kirsty Rolfe, “Probable Pasts and Possible Futures: Contemporaneity and the Consumption of News in the 1620s,” Media History 23, no. 2 (2017): 159–176; Brendan Dooley, “Preface,” in The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe , ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), xiii–xiv ; Sara Barker, “Time in English Translations of Continental News,” in NNEME , 328–349.

10. Raymond and Moxham, NNEME , 3; see Yann Ciarán Ryan, “‘More Difficult from Dublin than from Dieppe’: Ireland and Britain in a European Network of Communication,” Media History 24, no. 3–4 (2018): 458–476.

11. Joad Raymond, “News Networks: Putting the ‘News’ and ‘Networks’ Back in,” in NNEME , 102–129 (110).

12. Chiara Palazzo, “The Venetian News Network in the Early Sixteenth Century: The Battle of Chaldiran,” in NNEME , 849–869 (850).

13. See the essays collected in NNEME , in particular Nikolaus Schobesberger et al., “European Postal Networks,” 17–63; Dooley, “International News Flows,” Ruth Ahnert, “Maps Versus Networks,” 130–157; and Raymond, “News Networks”; see also Paul Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers: England in a European System of Communications,” in News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe , ed. Joad Raymond (London: Routledge, 2006), 19–34 ; Paul Arblaster, From Ghent to Aix: How They Brought the News in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1550–1700 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014) ; Carmen Espejo, “European Communication Networks in the Early Modern Age: A New Framework of Interpretation for the Birth of Journalism,” Media History 17, no. 2 (2011): 189–202; Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014) .

14. Raymond, “News Networks,” 110.

15. Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, “News Networks in Early Modern Europe,” in NNEME , 1–16 (14–15); Arblaster, From Ghent to Aix , 140; Nikolaus Schobesberger et al., “European Postal Networks,” in NNEME , 17–63.

16. See Will Slauter, “The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Annales: HSS 67 (2012): 253–278.

17. See Joop W. Koopmans, “A Sense of Europe: The Making of this Continent in Early Modern Dutch News Media,” in NNEME , 597–615.

18. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , in The Norton Shakespeare , ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 1339–1393, 1.3.33 (1346) and 3.1.1 (1363); for the “news spaces” of early modern Venice, see Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014) ; Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) .

19. For an account of developments in European news publication, see Pettegree, The Invention of News .

20. For more on the development and form of these texts, see Arblaster, “Posts, Newsletters, Newspapers”; Mario Infelise, “From Merchants’ Letters to Handwritten Political Avvisi : Notes on the Origins of Public Information,” in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe: Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe 1400–1700 , vol. 3, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33–52; Mario Infelise, “The History of a Word: Gazzetta/Gazette,” in NNEME , 241–260; Renate Pieper, “News from the New World: Spain’s Monopoly in the European Network of Handwritten Newsletters during the Sixteenth Century,” in NNEME , 493–511; de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice , 80–85.

21. See Carmen Espejo, “The Invention of the Gazette: Design Standardization in Spanish Newspapers, 1600–1650,” Media History 22, no. 3–4 (2016): 296–316; Michiel van Groesen, “Reading Newspapers in the Dutch Golden Age,” Media History 22, no. 3–4 (2016): 334–352; Nina Lamal, “Promoting the Catholic Cause on the Italian Peninsula: Printed Avvisi on the Dutch Revolt and the French Wars of Religion, 1562–1600,” in NNEME , 675–694; Otto Lankhorst, “Newspapers in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe , ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (London: Routledge, 2001), 151–159; Massimo Petta, “Networks of Printers and the Dissemination of News: The Case of Milan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World , ed. Richard Kirwan and Sophie Mullins (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 64–84 ; Massimo Petta, “War News in Early Modern Milan: The Birth and the Shaping of Printed News Pamphlets,” in NNEME , 280–304; Thomas Schröder, “The Origins of the German Press,” in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe , ed. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (London: Routledge, 2001), 123–150; Arthur der Weduwen, Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century, 1618–1700 , 2 vols. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017) .

22. For ballads as news texts, see Hyde, Singing the News ; Una McIlvenna, “When the News was Sung: Ballads as News Media in Early Modern Europe,” Media History 22, no. 3–4 (2016): 317–333; Angela J. McShane, Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011) ; Angela McShane, “Political Street Songs and Singers in Seventeenth‐Century England,” Renaissance Studies 33, no. 1 (2019): 94–118. I am very grateful to Dr. Hyde for tremendously helpful conversations and for sharing unpublished work.

23. Joad Raymond, “Censorship in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century England: Milton’s Areopagitica ,” in The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700 , ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 507–528 (515).

24. Raymond, “Censorship in Law and Practice,” 515–516.

25. See Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98–108.

26. Folke Dahl, A Bibliography of English Corantos and Periodical Newsbooks, 1620–1642 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1952), 31–48 .

27. Pettegree distinguishes between “news pamphlets,” a term he uses to refer to quartos containing an account of a single news story, and serialized news sheets or quartos containing a variety of reports, which he terms “newspapers.” Pettegree’s distinction—based on the differing relationships these texts form with readers, as well as differences in content and tone—is an important one, but I have chosen to use “news pamphlets” for both to highlight the connections between these forms. See Pettegree, The Invention of News , 228–229, 365–367.

28. Alexandra Hill, Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557–1640: An Analysis of the Stationers’ Company Register (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 80.

29. Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 194 ; Dahl, A Bibliography of English Corantos , 133, 223–265; Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10; see Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe “The Creation of the Periodical Press 1620–1695,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–1695 , ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 533–550.

30. Alexander Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002) .

31. Paul Arblaster et al., “The Lexicons of Early Modern News,” in NNEME , 64–101.

32. See Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 335–405 ; F. J. Levy, “How Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550–1640,” Journal of British Studies 21 (1982): 11–34; Richard Cust, “News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present 112 (1986): 60–90.

33. Ben Jonson, The Staple of News , ed. Joseph Loewenstein, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson , ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012; hereafter referenced as Works ), vol. 6, 1–157 (1.2.59–60, 29); for more on Jonson and news, see Mark Z. Muggli, “Ben Jonson and the Business of News,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32, no. 2 (1992): 323–340; Marcus Nevitt, “Ben Jonson and the Serial Publication of News,” Media History 11, no. 1–2 (2005), 53–68.

34. Jonson, Staple , 1.2.27 (28).

35. Jonson, Staple , 1.2.69–1.2.70 (30).

36. Both Archer and Sheffard operated out of Pope’s Head Alley across the road from the Exchange (S. A. Baron, “ Bourne, Nicholas ,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [2004; online ed. 2008]); see Dahl, A Bibliography of English Corantos , 60–79, for title pages giving Bourne’s, Archer’s, and Sheffard’s locations; for Downes, see the title page of Thomas Roe, A True and Faithfull Relation (London, 1622). Newbery’s shop was a short walk east along Cornhill, under St. Peter’s Church, and he may also have had a shop in Pope’s Head Alley; see, e.g., the title page of John Barlow, The Joy of the Upright Man (London, 1619).

37. See Fritz Levy, “Staging the News,” in Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England , ed. Arthur F. Moretti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 252–278.

38. Mark Thornton Burnett, “ Chapman, George ,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004; online ed. 2006).

39. See Levy, “Staging the News,” 258–260.

40. Lena Steveker, “English News Plays of the Early 1620s: Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess and Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News ,” in News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections , ed. Simon Davies and Puck Fletcher (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 215–229 .

41. Gary Taylor, “ Middleton, Thomas ,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004; online ed. 2008).

42. See The Stukeley Plays , ed. Charles Edelman (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005).

43. Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 145–147; Andrew Barker, A True and Certaine Report of the Beginning, Proceedings, Overthrowes, and now Present Estate of Captaine Ward and Danseker (London, 1609); Anonymous, Newes From Sea, of Two Notorious Pyrats Ward the Englishman, and Danseker the Dutchman (London, 1609).

44. Jonathan Burton, “The Shah’s Two Ambassadors: The Travels of the Three English Brothers and the Global Early Modern,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 , ed. Gitanjali Shahani and Brinda Charry (London: Routledge, 2009), 23–40 (33).

45. J. Andreas Löwe, “ Calverley, Walter ,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

46. On the authorship of The Yorkshire Tragedy and its place within the Shakespearean canon, see Will Sharpe, “Authorship and Attribution,” in William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays , ed. Jonathan Bate et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 643–747 (706–712); Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). I would like to thank Dr. Kirwan for sharing his work with me and pointing me in the direction of Sharpe’s invaluable piece.

47. See Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, “Introduction,” in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays , ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986), 1–32 (20–28); Marion Gibson, “ Sawyer, Elizabeth ,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

48. See Helen Ostovich, “Critical Introduction,” The Late Lancashire Witches , Richard Brome Online , 4–8; and the essays collected in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories , ed. Robert Poole (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003).

49. See Ostovich, “Critical Introduction,” 9–16; Alison Findlay, “Sexual and Spiritual Politics in the Events of 1633–34 and The Late Lancashire Witches ,” in The Lancashire Witches , ed. Poole, 146–165.

50. Modern spelling transcription from Ostovich, “Critical Introduction,” 1; originally transcribed in Herbert Berry, “The Globe Bewitched and El Hombre Fiel ,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984): 211–230 (215).

51. Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches (modern text), ed. Helen Ostovich, Richard Brome Online , 1.

52. Heywood and Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches , 1084.

53. Berry, “The Globe Bewitched”; Findlay, “Sexual and Spiritual Politics,” 150.

54. Ostovich, “Critical Introduction,” 15–16; Charlotte A. Coffin, “Theatre and/as Witchcraft: A Reading of The Late Lancashire Witches (1634),” Early Theatre 16, no. 2 (2013): 91–119.

55. Coffin, “Theatre and/as Witchcraft,” 100–101.

56. Ian Atherton, “The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century,” in News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain , ed. Joad Raymond (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 39–65 (43); see Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131; Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21–22.

57. See Muggli, “Ben Jonson and the Business of News,” 324–325.

58. William Cavendish[?], Duke of Newcastle (1620), Horae Subsecivae (London, 1620, STC.3957) D7r, D8r. The authorship of the Horae Subsecivae has been the subject of much critical discussion; authors that have been suggested include William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Grey Brydges, 5th Baron Chandos, and Thomas Hobbes. For Cavendish’s probable authorship—and what “authorship” might mean in this context, especially related to Hobbes’s role as tutor—see Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 52–64.

59. Ben Jonson, News from the New World Discovered in the Moon , ed. James Knowles, in Works , vol. 5, 431–461 (ll.18–9, 432).

60. Jonson, Staple , 3.2.76 (85).

61. Abraham Holland, A Continued Inquisition Against Paper-Persecutors , appended to John Davies, A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (London, 1625), A4r; Mark Eccles, “Thomas Gainsford, ‘Captain Pamphlet’,” Huntington Library Quarterly 45 (1982): 259–270.

62. Jonson, Staple , 1.5.23, 58–61 (41).

63. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), M4r.

64. John Earle, Microcosmographie (London, 1628), J11v.

65. John Marston, The Malcontent , ed. Bernard Harris, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedies: A New Mermaid Anthology (Tonbridge, UK: Ernest Benn, 1984), 481–585 (498, 1.3.16–1.3.20).

66. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 138.

67. Karras, Common Women , 138.

68. John Taylor, Taylor His Travels: From the Citty of London in England, to the Citty of Prague in Bohemia (London, 1620), A2r, A4r.

69. John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England (London, 1631), A3r.

70. See Andrew Mousley’s discussion of the newsgathering activities of John Pory, John Rous, and Walter Yonge in “Self, State, and Seventeenth-Century News,” The Seventeenth Century 6, no. 2 (1991): 149–168.

71. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , 1.3.17 (1346), and 1.3.101 (1348).

72. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice , 3.1.1 (1363).

73. David Randall, Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 123 .

74. William Shakespeare, Othello , ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1.3.19–1.3.21 (216).

75. Noah Millstone, “Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England,” Past & Present 223, no. 1 (2014): 77–127 (82).

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Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art Research Paper

Introduction, the beginning of the visual perspective, visual perspective in art, geometry in art.

Renaissance unleashed a flood of creativity in the form of art, philosophy, mathematics, architecture, alchemy, and other visual forms of expression. The period saw a blending of different art forms and each inspired the other. This was mainly due to the fact that many artists were mathematicians, alchemists, philosophers, etc. Renaissance art in particular had many instances where geometrical representations and perspectives were used. This paper analyses the works of some great masters who have used geometrical visual perspective in Renaissance art (Dunning, 1991).

Murray (Murray, 1963) has suggested that the concept of using perspective in art forms such as drawing and painting first started in the early 14 th century when an architect from Florence, Filippo di ser Brunelleschi sketched the famous landmark building of San Giovanni Baptistery. What Filippo had done was create an illusion by scaling the objects in the drawing so that objects nearer to an observer appeared larger while objects further away were drawn smaller. This created a visual perspective and the sketch appeared as it would appear to the naked eye. Murray has argued that perspective allowed the illiterate and the literate to visualize a picture and created a pictorial space that unified the beholder with the image.

The use of perspective allows a three-dimensional image to be made on a two-dimensional surface. Visual perspective allowed the artist to use basic geometry and unify distant forests and buildings, cityscapes, and tidal waves with human, animate, and inanimate forms. It was perspective that allows the artist to blend different worlds and environments into a single surface. Many artists such as Piero Della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Leone Battista Alberti, Albrecht Dürer, Galileo Galilei, and others have used geometry and perspective to create the fine art of illusion and perspective.

Kubovy (Kubovy, 2005) has provided a detailed analysis of how the Renaissance Master have used geometry and perspective. The authors have suggested that not only was perspective regarded as central to giving aesthetic perceptions but it was also used “deliberate discrepancy between the viewer’s actual point of view and a virtual point of view experienced by the viewer on the basis of cues contained in the perspective organization of the painting”. Perspective was used to provide a rationalized depiction of space, area, and depth. This allowed the painters to paint group scenes in a complex spatially manner. The painting ‘The Tribute Money’ painted by Masaccio shows how perspective was used to pull the viewer’s attention to an important aspect of the painting.

In the picture, the tilting and slanting lines that present the chazzan or the horizontal feature of the building fades into the background. This is called the Orthogonal and it represents the lines that are at the right angle to the picture plane. These lines will meet at a point in the distance and this is called the vanishing point. In the above picture, the vanishing point is placed on the right side of Christ and draws attention to him. Domenico Veneziano has played with the vanishing point concept in a different manner. In his painting Martyrdom of Saint Lucy, the vanishing point is appearing at to draw attention to the action and the arm of the executioner who is plunging a dagger into the saint’s neck.

In another painting, visual elements and powerful elements of a painting are made to interact with the vanishing point. Kubovy has suggested that in one of his paintings called ‘Madonna and Child with Four Saints’, Madonna holds the infant Jesus, and the four saints are standing in the foreground. Madonna is wearing a cloak that creates a triangle when it covers her knees. The vertex is pointing down and matches with the arches decoration in the background and this forms the vanishing point.

The four saints shown in the picture are St Francis, the left figure, and St John’s second image on the left, St Zenobius, the second image on the right side. The author suggests that the eyes and fingers of the three saints are all directed at the orthogonal and the viewer’s attention is immediately drawn to Madonna and the infant Jesus.

Kubovy has suggested that there were four uses of perspective: illusionistic focus, structural focus, and narrative focus. He has also suggested that artists used perspective to create a theological allusion. The following text is quoted from the book by Kubovy.:

“ The most obvious factor in Domenico’s scheme of dimensions and proportions, as might be expected, is three. The elemental shape from which the pattern of floor tiles is derived is the equilateral triangle; the viewing distance, or invisible floor, is three times the visible floor; the Gothic facade consists of three bays and is three G [ = the interval between columns of the Gothic loggia] high (including the putative entablature) by three wide; the floor is feet wide at the baseline and the total depth of the architecture beyond the baseline is 27, or 33 feet. A second and less obvious element in the proportions is the interplay between 2 and 3. We look across a floor which is 3/2 G deep at an elevation (without the entablature) of which the base is 2/3 G below eye level and the proportions above eye level are 2:3. The overall proportions of the elevation, 23 :3.2 The proportions of the four large rectangles of floor into which the plan forward of the exhedra naturally divides are, beginning with the invisible floor, 3:2, 1:2, 1:3, and 2:3. No doubt the theological allusion of this coupling of 2 and 3 is the expansion of the dual deity to the Trinity with the coming of Christ.” (Kubovy 2005)

Kubovy (Kubovy 2005) has explained the problems and challenges that the Renaissance artists faced in the early days. In the early days of the Renaissance when there was no concept of taking an image, artists faced the problem of understanding the concept of optics, understand abstractions and then draw real-life figures in perspectives. Brunelleschi created an experiment using a small hole in a panel and then making viewers see the plaiting with a mirror. This experiment allowed artists to better visualize geometry and how objects could be represented geometrically. He allowed an illusion of depth to be formed when in fact there was none.

Donatello played with the concept of robustness of perspective and the fact that a picture would not appear distorted when viewed from a different angle. This concept was very important as it allowed artists to experiment with different geometric figures and yet ensure that the same visual representation was given to the viewers.

The work was a gilded bronze panel and it was placed in the Siena Baptistery. The work was placed below eye level and the bass relief figures at the fore and the distant arches at the back presented a contrast that deceived the eye of viewers.

Kubovy has suggested that geometry served to achieve a few important things for the Renaissance artists.

• Scenographic Device: Perspective was used to introduce drama and action in a scene. Stage dramas that were staged in the Renaissance period used perspective-drawn images in the background to infuse a sense of distance and depth.
• Provide a sense of Action: The Renaissance painters actually had a small strip of canvas in which the scale of a vast image needed to be displayed and the concept of action to be shown. The images had to speak for themselves and perspective and geometry helped to deliver this message
• Emphasis Point: This was a key concept that was utilized to the full by drawing viewers’ attention to a specific area of a large canvas. Artists such as Leonardo used this very effectively when he drew the last supper.
• Evocating Moods and Feelings: Artists used perspective and illusion to depict and convey the mood of anger, desperation, and other feelings.

Kubolov has suggested that Italian artists used perspective, not for any visual reality but because that is how they represented the space in a picture. He has quoted Leonardo and says “the eye is adapted to receive like the ear the images of objects without transmitting some potency in exchange for these”

• Dunning William V (1991). ‘Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting’. Syracuse University Press: New York
• Kubovy Michael & Tyler Christopher (2005), ‘ Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art ’. Web.
• Murray Linda, Peter Murray (1963). ‘The Art of the Renaissance’. Praeger Publications: New York
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 13). Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-perspective-in-renaissance-art/

"Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art." IvyPanda , 13 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/visual-perspective-in-renaissance-art/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art'. 13 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art." September 13, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-perspective-in-renaissance-art/.

1. IvyPanda . "Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art." September 13, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-perspective-in-renaissance-art/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Visual Perspective in Renaissance Art." September 13, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/visual-perspective-in-renaissance-art/.

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Faculty Scholarship

Creative convergence: the ai renaissance in art and design.

James Hutson , Lindenwood University Follow Jason Lively , Lindenwood University Follow Bryan Robertson , Yavapai College Peter Cotroneo , The University of Tampa Martin Lang , Columbia College

Document Type

Embark on a journey that transcends the boundaries of art and technology in the groundbreaking realm of Creative Convergence: The AI Renaissance in Art and Design . This isn't just another book on art and technology- it's a journey that sparks curiosity, fuels innovation, and challenges traditional artistic boundaries.

Discover the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it melds with human expression, propelling artistry into uncharted territories and redefining traditional notions of both originality and creativity. The text is not just about art or AI; it is about the fusion of both, catalyzing a creative revolution that challenges previous assumptions about human-machine collaboration and how ideation, conceptualization, process and execution are radically rethought.

Have you ever wondered how/will AI revolutionize training, education and execution in art and design? Delve into this captivating treatment that contextualizes the disruptions we are experiencing today in the technological innovations and artistic responses and integrations of the past five hundred years. Human creativity has always struggled against technological advance, but ultimately integrated and redefined what "art" is in each era. As such, you will see how AI can be incorporated in various artistic disciplines in this study. Explore real-world case studies that showcase AI's practical impact on 3D design, drawing, digital art, and even web design.

The book also addresses the controversial question: Can AI be a co-creator in the creative and artistic process, even assisting in creating an original, signature style? Brace yourself for revelations that will challenge your perceptions of traditional artistry.

Publication Date

Recommended citation.

Hutson, James; Lively, Jason; Robertson, Bryan; Cotroneo, Peter; and Lang, Martin, "Creative Convergence: The AI Renaissance in Art and Design" (2023). Faculty Scholarship . 524. https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/faculty-research-papers/524

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How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward

Journalists, researchers and the public often look at society through the lens of generation, using terms like Millennial or Gen Z to describe groups of similarly aged people. This approach can help readers see themselves in the data and assess where we are and where we’re headed as a country.

Pew Research Center has been at the forefront of generational research over the years, telling the story of Millennials as they came of age politically and as they moved more firmly into adult life . In recent years, we’ve also been eager to learn about Gen Z as the leading edge of this generation moves into adulthood.

But generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.

Recently, as we were preparing to embark on a major research project related to Gen Z, we decided to take a step back and consider how we can study generations in a way that aligns with our values of accuracy, rigor and providing a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue.

A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations.

We set out on a yearlong process of assessing the landscape of generational research. We spoke with experts from outside Pew Research Center, including those who have been publicly critical of our generational analysis, to get their take on the pros and cons of this type of work. We invested in methodological testing to determine whether we could compare findings from our earlier telephone surveys to the online ones we’re conducting now. And we experimented with higher-level statistical analyses that would allow us to isolate the effect of generation.

What emerged from this process was a set of clear guidelines that will help frame our approach going forward. Many of these are principles we’ve always adhered to , but others will require us to change the way we’ve been doing things in recent years.

Here’s a short overview of how we’ll approach generational research in the future:

We’ll only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life. When comparing generations, it’s crucial to control for age. In other words, researchers need to look at each generation or age cohort at a similar point in the life cycle. (“Age cohort” is a fancy way of referring to a group of people who were born around the same time.)

When doing this kind of research, the question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today. The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.

To answer this question, it’s necessary to have data that’s been collected over a considerable amount of time – think decades. Standard surveys don’t allow for this type of analysis. We can look at differences across age groups, but we can’t compare age groups over time.

Another complication is that the surveys we conducted 20 or 30 years ago aren’t usually comparable enough to the surveys we’re doing today. Our earlier surveys were done over the phone, and we’ve since transitioned to our nationally representative online survey panel , the American Trends Panel . Our internal testing showed that on many topics, respondents answer questions differently depending on the way they’re being interviewed. So we can’t use most of our surveys from the late 1980s and early 2000s to compare Gen Z with Millennials and Gen Xers at a similar stage of life.

This means that most generational analysis we do will use datasets that have employed similar methodologies over a long period of time, such as surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau. A good example is our 2020 report on Millennial families , which used census data going back to the late 1960s. The report showed that Millennials are marrying and forming families at a much different pace than the generations that came before them.

Even when we have historical data, we will attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons. If we accept that there are real differences across generations, we’re basically saying that people who were born around the same time share certain attitudes or beliefs – and that their views have been influenced by external forces that uniquely shaped them during their formative years. Those forces may have been social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances or political movements.

When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

The tricky part is isolating those forces from events or circumstances that have affected all age groups, not just one generation. These are often called “period effects.” An example of a period effect is the Watergate scandal, which drove down trust in government among all age groups. Differences in trust across age groups in the wake of Watergate shouldn’t be attributed to the outsize impact that event had on one age group or another, because the change occurred across the board.

Changing demographics also may play a role in patterns that might at first seem like generational differences. We know that the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and that race and ethnicity are linked with certain key social and political views. When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

Controlling for these factors can involve complicated statistical analysis that helps determine whether the differences we see across age groups are indeed due to generation or not. This additional step adds rigor to the process. Unfortunately, it’s often absent from current discussions about Gen Z, Millennials and other generations.

When we can’t do generational analysis, we still see value in looking at differences by age and will do so where it makes sense. Age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. And even if age gaps aren’t rooted in generational differences, they can still be illuminating. They help us understand how people across the age spectrum are responding to key trends, technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Each stage of life comes with a unique set of experiences. Young adults are often at the leading edge of changing attitudes on emerging social trends. Take views on same-sex marriage , for example, or attitudes about gender identity .

Many middle-aged adults, in turn, face the challenge of raising children while also providing care and support to their aging parents. And older adults have their own obstacles and opportunities. All of these stories – rooted in the life cycle, not in generations – are important and compelling, and we can tell them by analyzing our surveys at any given point in time.

When we do have the data to study groups of similarly aged people over time, we won’t always default to using the standard generational definitions and labels. While generational labels are simple and catchy, there are other ways to analyze age cohorts. For example, some observers have suggested grouping people by the decade in which they were born. This would create narrower cohorts in which the members may share more in common. People could also be grouped relative to their age during key historical events (such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic) or technological innovations (like the invention of the iPhone).

By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences.

Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts. A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.

With these considerations in mind, our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

• Age & Generations
• Demographic Research
• Generation X
• Generation Z
• Generations
• Greatest Generation
• Methodological Research
• Millennials
• Silent Generation

Kim Parker is director of social trends research at Pew Research Center

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