Description

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book’
Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement

News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel.

This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language.

Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

Publisher Review

Highly ambitious and impressive ... here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount -- Noel Malcolm * Times Literary Supplement * Utopian is the ambition to write a history of news, that most quicksilver of commodities, and Raymond Wren has knowingly attempted the impossible ... The Great Exchange must be counted a triumphant success -- Daniel Johnson * The Critic * Capacious in structure, monumental in volume ... Raymond Wren is a recovering academic, expert in the field of bibliography ... and he was always going to be obliged by temperament to burst free of its limitations -- Minoo Dinshaw * Spectator *