1. For a Theory of the History

Our knowledge about the History of Early Modern Journalism in Europe has grown exponentially in the last two decades. New resources in information technology (databases of journalistic publications, digitization of old papers)¹ and increasing specialization in academia have allowed for the proliferation of local and national histories of journalism. If, as many experts maintain, a first positivist phase of data summary continues to be inescapable in any historical discipline, then it could be argued that we are on the verge of going beyond that phase.

In addition, although to a much lesser extent, important histories of modern journalism in Europe have been published in recent years that have had what could be understood as a geographical dimension. These histories gather chapters dedicated to the journalism of different nations and, in some cases, they attempt to simultaneously contribute to a framework of global understanding, which almost always insists on the Pan-European character of the first journalism, while continuing to indicate significant differences between the national models described.Reference Dooley and Baron²

However, the simple accumulation of data, or the comparison or summary of such, does not appear to have generated a history of European early modern journalism that has gone beyond the descriptive phase to become historical explanation. Paraphrasing Deacon, who stated that ‘research is never a self-sufficient activity. Theory is its conjoined twin’, we can say that we are in need of a ‘Theory of the history of the first European Journalism’.Reference Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock³

On this point, the difficulties regarding the History of Early Modern Journalism are not different from those of the discipline in general, or even from those of communication studies with a comprehensive historical approach. At the end of the last century, James Curran stated that historical research was ‘the marginalised grandmother of communication studies’, and at the beginning of this century O’Malley insisted on the tension between history and theory, or more specifically, between empirical and abstract approaches in studies on communication media.Reference O’Malley⁴ More recently, experts in methodology have distributed the faults more equitably, and have indicated their progressive distancing from their roots in other humanistic and social disciplines: ‘As cultural and media studies become ever more self-enclosed, so too the empirical techniques essential to understanding and extending their output become truncated and myopic’.Reference Deacon, Pickering, Golding and Murdock³

This distancing between empirical and theoretical interpretive approaches is particularly evident in the sphere of the History of Early Modern Journalism. The methodological trends more favoured by the historians have had little following among scholars of the first examples of journalism. Most works, whether focusing on local, national or European journalism, usually do not even specify any epistemological or methodological positioning.

However, the lack of specificity or reflection on the matter does not prevent their position extending to the reader: most of the History of Early Modern Journalism is assigned, consciously or subconsciously, to the theory of modernization. This theory generally underlies our vision of history, and has even permeated the language of postmodern historians, says Walker,Reference Walker⁵ such that it is almost impossible to undo the teleological bias that it imprints on our view of the past. The ‘Early Modern’ is that period of history in which the phenomena destined to succeed in our contemporary world began to unfold, and therefore our mission as historians is precisely to identify where and when those phenomena began to arise. Applying this approach to the History of Journalism, the historian is dedicated to seeking in the past for the appearance of the first examples of journalistic activity ‘as we know it today’. This methodological conditioning means that some features of the first journalism, such as its periodicity or absence thereof, acquire fundamental importance in the account, so that historians enthusiastically indicate the appearance of the first ‘truly’ periodic publication, the first ‘true’ newspaper in a certain territory, as milestones.

In this article we propose a methodological critique of the History of Early Modern Journalism. Our critique starts from a general premise: the methodological approaches of the History of Journalism must fall into step with those of other historiographical disciplines, and must also be able to integrate theoretical foundations, originating from communications studies or other humanistic and social sciences. In particular, our proposal recommends a review of the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ concepts applied to research in the History of Early Modern Journalism.

We indicated above that an important accumulation of local and national case studies has taken place in recent years. This accumulation, beneficial in that it allows us to sharpen our knowledge on the subject, could have had the perverse effect of impeding the necessary review; as in the classic saying, it is possible we would not being able to see the wood for the trees. We therefore propose a reconsideration of the methodological validity of the ‘case study’, which recovers the heuristic dimension granted by Microhistory.

The current study on the Gazeta de Roma in Valencia (1618–1620) is but a sample of this microscopic and intensive procedure, in addition to being an important and revealing example that enables us to reinterpret the concept of periodicity, and attempt to rewrite the History of Early Modern journalism in Spain and therefore in Europe. We will discuss the value of periodicity as a demarcation. The key reading of modernization, hitherto dominant in the field, conceptualizes periodization with the same characteristics with which it is manifest in contemporary journalism: the issue of an informative product, recognizable through a permanent header, with exact periodic regularity (in the case of a daily, for example, once a day, each morning or evening). However, the periodicity of the information was perceived by the contemporaries of the first European newspapers according to other characteristics and criteria: a ‘newspaper’ was then a serial document that informed progressively about the news from a certain area at that time, the continuity of which was recognizable thanks to certain typographical resources, in the absence of the header concept.

2. Critical Approach to the Concept of Periodicity

It is generally accepted in histories of journalism that periodization began in Europe in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Its emergence is related to the consolidation of stable postal networks throughout Europe, from the last decade of the 16th century. Some authors have also related the emergence of periodicity to reasons inherent in the journalistic market: without periodicity, it could not have been consolidated because the cheap product needed predictable and regular sales income to be viable in the market.Reference Sommerville⁶

We do not doubt the importance that periodicity had on the appearance and later consolidation of the first journalism. In 1690, the work De Relationibus novellis by Tobías Peucer, highly important for being the first dissertation on journalism, already referred to the notion of periodicity and dedicated a whole chapter to the concept. Much more recently, Franciscato indicates periodicity as one of the five temporal categories that have historically given regularity to journalistic activity, together with instantaneity, simultaneousness, novelty and public revelation: ‘Journalistic periodicity institutionalized itself as a way of ordering social time, whether as a form of control and normalization, or as the creation of material or symbolic social contents, practices and processes’.Reference Franciscato⁷

However, novelty has neither an absolute nor a precise sense but varies according to the periodicity of the media. We have witnessed somehow the devaluation of the concept of periodicity in the last decades, coinciding with the arrival of instantaneous communication media such as radio and television and the consolidation of the Information Technologies.

Sfez defines papers, together with radio and television, as products of a ‘culture de flot’. The ‘flow media’ are characterized by continuity in their diffusion:

This contemporary definition of periodicity as ‘periodification’ or ‘culture de flot’ allows a better understanding of the appearance of journalism in Europe.

Periodicity was conditioned by the needs of the public, by its uses and customs. Printers of the first decades of the seventeenth century adjusted the rate of production of the news to the pace of life of their readers. They rehearsed not only with standardization of time (that is, periodicity), but also of formats, genres, technical means and manpower. Thanks to standardization of the product and continuity in diffusion, gazettes of the first decades of the seventeenth century ensured a stable readership. We propose to focus on the criterion of seriality to describe the phenomenon, instead of periodicity. Seriality was common in European journalism through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was recognized by readers from different textual or paratextual features, as we aim to analyse in the next sections.

3. Consolidation of Periodicity in the First European Journalism

The first gazettes with an established periodicity, weekly at first, appear in the German lands: the Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien of Strasbourg is documented from 1605, and the Aviso Relation oder Zeitung of Wolfenbüttel from 1609. Shortly after, the first weekly gazettes appear in the Netherlands: a Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c dated 14 June 1618, is conserved, as is a copy of Tydinghen uyt verscheyde quartieren, also from 1618, and both printed in Amsterdam. In Antwerp, a gazette called Nieuwe Tijdinghen began in 1620. Therefore, weekly periodicity in Central European journalism can be considered consolidated as of 1618/1620.

However, this statement needs a review. The periodicity of many of these first European gazettes is doubtful, if by periodicity we understand a fixed scheme of publication in a definite interval of time. It is difficult to find exact information on the publication rates, but we know for instance that the above-mentioned Flemish gazette of Antwerp, Nieuwe Tijdinghen published from 1620, did not acquire a stricter weekly publication rate until its second stage, in 1629, when the newspaper began to be called Wekelijcke Tydinghen, ‘weekly tidings’.Reference Arblaster¹⁰ In England, periodicity was not consolidated until the 1640s, when newspapers of the Civil War began to be issued one day per week, later two, always on fixed days.Reference Sommerville⁶ The first weekly gazettes in Scandinavia appeared in the 1630s and 1640s.

The French Gazette was regular in its weekly periodicity. In its first year of publication, it came out punctually every seven days, with the date indicated at the foot of the last page of each copy. Renaudot provided Nouvelles Ordinaires with that same weekly periodicity; it was published jointly with the Gazette from 1632, and they were even printed on the same day of the week.

In peripheral states such as Spain and Portugal, the weekly periodicity was consolidated later. In Spain, in the 1640s, a series of gazettes was published in Catalan or Spanish in Barcelona: for instance, those published between 1640 and 1643 by the printers Jaume Romeu, Jaume Mathevad, Gabriel Noguers and Pere Lacavalleria. Among these gazettes is the one that, according to Guillamet, is probably the first publication of the peninsula in which the usual weekly periodicity of European gazettes was incorporated in its design: the Gazeta of Jaume Romeu of 1641, in Catalan, is quite a faithful translation of Renaudot’s French gazette, which also depended on periodicity.Reference Guillamet¹¹

In 1661, the Gaceta Nueva, later Gaceta de Madrid was published, the first official publication of its kind in Hapsburg Spain. The periodicity of this Gazette was monthly, and it was the first to maintain a more or less stable header throughout its time. On the other hand, the continuity of the Gaceta de Madrid was patchy. It was published with the name of Gaceta Nueva for two years (1661 and 1662). After a long interruption, it reappeared in 1667 with the name of Gaceta Ordinaria de Madrid, which it maintained until 1680. It received several other titles throughout several stages, but in 1762 Charles III recognized it as an official publication of the State and thus guaranteed its continuation. However, this Gaceta de Madrid did not adopt weekly periodicity until 1677.

In Portugal, the Gazeta (1641–1647) is considered the first Portuguese newspaper. Initially of monthly periodicity, it has been nicknamed ‘da Restauração’ for being published during the convulsive period that followed Portugal’s independence from the Spanish dominions. The Gazeta imitated the model of Renaudot’s French Gazette; although it did not always have a regular periodicity, the Gazeta ‘da Restauração’ can be considered a periodic publication in the sense that at least 37 numbers were published successively over the course of six years. Published monthly and uninterruptedly between 1663 and 1667, the Mercúrio Português succeeded the Gazeta ‘da Restauração´ through the initiative of the Secretary of State, António de Sousa de Macedo. The disappearance of the Mercúrio Português coincided with the end of the Guerra da Restauração against Spain, which left Portugal without significant periodic publications until 1715, the year of the birth of the official Gazeta de Lisboa with weekly periodicity.

Therefore, periodicity is a valid criterion for the definition of Early Modern journalism, as long as we admit that this periodicity does not conform to the exact scheme that we consider in contemporary journalism, and it had an unequal rate of implementation in the different European areas.

4. The First Gazette Published in Spain: the Gaceta de Roma in Valencia (1618–1620)

The contemporaries of this first European journalism did not consider periodicity to be an indispensable criterion for a publication to be perceived as serial information of the time. Hitherto, historians have given little attention to other criteria, which are definitive in our opinion: (a) the normalization or standardization of the informative product, and (b) the internationalism in the scope of the news. In the section that follows, and through a case study, we will try to show that these were fundamental criteria for the establishment and recognition of the first journalistic genre, the gazette.

We are convinced that an exhaustive description of the printing market in Spain throughout the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first four decades of the seventeenth century, would allow the discovery of a greater presence of serial publications than might be concluded from a mere nominal reading of the titles. Throughout those 50 years, printers in Seville, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid and other localities published news pamphlets with continuity, called ‘avisos’ (notices), ‘nuevas’ (news), or ‘correos’ (posts), and only on some occasions ‘gacetas’. These publications lacked a unitary header, they were not numbered, and sometimes they also lacked other textual or paratextual conventions that allow contemporary librarians and historians to give them recognition as serial publications. Even so, our hypothesis is that many of them were recognized as a series of periodic information, that is to say, as newspapers, by their contemporaries.

A case study that may lead to the confirmation of our hypothesis is our ongoing research about the Gazeta de Roma. This Gazeta de Roma was a newspaper published in Valencia during 1619, from the press of Felipe Mey – who was, already dead at that time so the company was in the hands of his sons.¹² The title probably alludes to the circumstances by which this series became possible: somebody who resided in Rome collected information about the international news of the time from avvisi, letters, diplomatic dispatches, rumours, etc., and produced, in an aseptic discourse, a product whose design anticipated periodic issue. The moment was propitious for these types of companies because Europe was attending to the preparations and first skirmishes of the Thirty Years War, which indeed was reported upon in the pages of the Gazeta de Roma. The study of the production and diffusion of this gazette will hopefully allow us, in the near future, to identify its author in Rome and who received it in Valencia.

Until now, only a single issue of this publication was known, described in Spanish bibliographical catalogues, which has prevented it from being known as part of a series. Of this single number, one sole example is conserved in the Royal Library of Turin, in Italy. The complete title of the pamphlet is: La Gazeta de Roma. En la qval vienen diferentes auisos de los pasados, assi de las sangrientas guerras, como de casos muy señalados que han sucedido por diuersas partes del mundo. Venida con este Ordinario de Roma, que llego aquí a Valencia a 3. De Enero, deste Año 1619.

The huge recovery task conducted in European libraries in recent years has allowed us to discover the existence of two other numbers of this gazette: La Gazeta de Roma, venida con este Ordinario, que llego aquí a 7. de Março deste Año 1619; and La Gazeta de Roma, Venida con este Ordinario, que llego aquí a los postreros deste mes de Setiembre, deste Año 1619. ¹³

Therefore, the publication of this Gazeta de Roma in Valencia extends at least throughout 1619, because three numbers are conserved corresponding to January, March and September of that year. We have no indication from which to infer whether the publication was subject to a periodicity, but there is no doubt that the design allowed readers to recognize these three numbers as belonging to the same series.

Design is very similar in the three issues, although the different typography used in the naming of the newspaper does not allow the term ‘header’ to be used in the present sense. In the first issue, of January 1619, ‘LA GAZETA DE ROMA’ is written in capital letters; in the second, of March, ‘La gazeta de Roma’ appears in small letters; and in the last one, September 1619, the header is divided into two lines and capital and small letters are used successively: ‘LA GAZETA/de Roma’. Furthermore, the three numbers use the same design template: header; summary; Papal coat of arms of Pope Paul V; licence and footnote. The last two issues are especially similar in their design: the summary comprises three paragraphs, respectively written in round, cursive and round letter again. In addition, these two last issues have headers whose wording begins identically: ‘La Gazeta de Roma, venida con este ordinario, que llegó aquí a…’, ‘came with this ordinary [post], that arrived here on...’ (followed by the date). In addition to the stylistic homogeneity in both the presentation and the content, these three gazettes seem to have been approved by the same authority, because they appear signed by ‘V. Cardona Fisci Advoc.’, surely the granter of the licence.

Three conserved numbers, throughout one year, do not seem sufficient to speak of a periodic gazette. However, even discarding the more than reasonable probability that other numbers of the series have been lost, we think that this standardization of the design was sufficient for the public to recognize the serial character of the publication, independently of how many numbers the series had, or if the reader had some foreknowledge of the periodicity of the publication.

Standardization is a central argument in favour of the pan-Europeanism of Early Modern journalism. The basic scheme of this design had been consolidated in the Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century and thence spread to the rest of Europe. Petta has explained that news publications had to face the lack of credibility that their ephemeral nature and widespread anonymity entailed, in a cultural environment in which, until then, this credibility had rested on the longevity of texts and the authority of the author. Different textual and paratextual markers rapidly helped the reader to recognize this new mode of authority, that of the journalist: a front page that occupied all of one side of the paper and which usually included the name of the genre (‘carta’, ‘aviso’, ‘relación’, etc.); a title that contained the summary of the main events and the source of information; other titles often alternated between cursive and round letter styles; a coat of arms of some institution that was linked to a greater or lesser extent, often appearing more frequently than the illustrative engraving; the licence and a footnote.Reference Petta¹⁴

Petta considers that printers linked to the important Milan-Rome axis soon proposed this design, which was finally adopted by printers/editors such as Bernardino Beccari, Girolamo Accolti or Pandolfo Malatesta in the decade of the 1690s. The scheme was later internationalized thanks to the European diffusion of the series of Italian avvisi at the end of this same century, printed in numerous Italian offices and in many European presses outside Italy.

These Italian avvisi had spread widely through the Iberian Peninsula, and in cities such as Seville or Valencia they were translated and republished by the local presses. In this way, throughout the second decade of the seventeenth century, the standardized design of the Italian avvisi had already been assimilated by some of the more thriving Spanish presses, such as the one in Seville. In this city, several printers published news pamphlets, avvisi or gazettes (the boundaries between these genres were undoubtedly still diffuse) with this same presentation having already become a conventional characteristic.

The normalization of the design therefore allows the serial document to be recognized. Another characteristic, we think, allows the recognition of its condition as an informative or ‘journalistic’ document is the internationalism of the news, with regard to both its content and, fundamentally, its sources of information. These first European gazettes attempted to become recognizable in the market by emphasizing their sources of information on the front page, and which were almost always international (arrivals through international mail therefore) and ‘professional’: originating from anonymous notices or official dispatches and letters, and therefore no longer through personal letters addressed to a friend or client. In our example: ‘La Gazeta de Roma. En la qval vienen diferentes auisos de los pasados, assi de las sangrientas guerras, como de casos muy señalados que han sucedido por diuersas partes del mundo. Venida con este Ordinario de Roma, que llego aquí a Valencia a 3. De Enero, deste Año 1619’ (our italics); ‘containing different news items... from throughout the world. Came with the ordinary post from Rome...’ (our translation).

The mention of Rome as a nerve centre in which the information is compiled is not accidental. It surely corresponds to the real location of the agent who supplied the information (perhaps somebody close to Spanish diplomatic circles in the Vatican, since the gazette exhibits the Papal coat of arms), and the mention of Rome added authenticity and prestige to the information. Many other Spanish avvisi and gazettes mentioned ‘de Roma’ or ‘romana’ in their title, and, as we know, the term ‘gazette’ has an Italian origin and began to circulate internationally at that time.

The intention of the printer to create a periodic gazette, the first thus documented in the Iberian Peninsula, therefore seems beyond all doubt, contradicting the idea that the publication of gazettes did not arrive in these lands until the second half of the seventeenth century. We hope that the next scouring of old libraries will find other numbers of this Gazeta de Roma in Valencia. We have already found that Felipe Mey, the printer, published avvisi with content very similar to these gazettes, and at very approximate dates, and with very similar titles. The disappearance of the title ‘La Gazeta de Roma’ does not allow us to be sure that it is the same periodic series, although that is our conclusion:

The first of these uses a design identical to that of the two latter analysed gazettes, whereas the second one, which also maintains the design regarding typeface and paragraph arrangement, also introduces the Royal coat of arms of Philip III. The first, instead of gazette, is called ‘relación de avisos’; the second one, ‘avisos de Roma’. In agreement with our hypothesis in this work, the normalization in the design and the reference to the international character of the publication (‘came with the last ordinary [post]’, in both cases), could have been sufficient for readers to recognize them as numbers of the same series.

Another number of this presumed series predates the numbers already described and extends the date of publication to 1618: Relacion de avisos qve se saben en Roma, desde ocho de Setiembre deste año 1618, hasta hoy. There is the same basic design in the header and the summary, and this time again with the Royal coat of arms. The signature that closes the document is the same as that on the publications already seen. Although the term ‘gazeta’ and the mention of the ordinary mail do not appear in this number, the title ‘relación de avisos’, the location of the source in Rome and the arrangement of the front page elements would have been sufficient for the reader to recognize this early number, perhaps the first one, as pertaining to a journalistic series.

Other publications from the same printer may have been part of the series, although their titles no longer include ‘gaceta’ or ‘avisos’, but they do refer to the place where the information was compiled, always Rome, and to the way it arrived in Valencia, always via ordinary mail:

The cover design is identical and in both cases the Royal coat of arms is used as had already been the case with other previous numbers. The first of these two numbers begins with a sentence that clearly reveals its assignment to a series: ‘A los ocho de septiembre (como se avisó en los pasados) vino nueva de la ciudad de Fráncfort…’ (‘On September 8th, as it was announced in the previous [numbers], news came from Frankfurt...’, our translation); indeed, the gazette immediately preceding, titled Avisos de Roma, is dated at the end of October and closes with this paragraph: ‘A los ocho llego aquí auiso de Francfort...’ (‘On 8th news from Frankfurt arrived...’, our translation).

Reading the documents reveals that it is undoubtedly in the same tone, and by the same hand, that wrote a succession of avvisi that also came from the same geographic points from whence came the news of the previous gazettes; the signature at the end of the document is always the same, ‘V. Paschal pro Fisci Advocatus’.

Therefore, we have a periodic gazette whose existence had gone unnoticed until now due to the different denomination of the header of its numbers. If we accept that all these publications form part of the same periodic or semi-periodic gazette, we would have numbers corresponding to the final months of 1618; January, March, July, September, October and November of 1619; and February of 1620. We could suppose then that this gazette was designed with monthly periodicity; we must remember that the mail was sent once a month from Rome to Madrid (and thence to Valencia and other locations).

Another three publications might be integrated into this periodic series, although it is not possible to assert it as convincingly:

In these three, possibly the last conserved issues of the series, the homogeneity in the design has disappeared. The first and third both have an allusive engraving, whereas the second includes a small decorative typographic element. Although the basic structure of the cover is maintained, the type font is not the same as in the previous numbers. The reference to the source of the news (Rome) is conserved in the titles or headers, as is the mode of transmission, ordinary mail, in two cases; but the absence of the date in the header is significant. However, a reading of the three publications allows verification that the journalistic routine had not varied: the first of these three publications covers the events from December 1619 to February 1620; the second from February to March 1620; and the third from August to October 1620. Perhaps the press of Felipe Mey stopped emphasizing the dates on the front page when faced with the impossibility of maintaining the monthly periodicity?

Although the content of the news continues being international, the different tone in which the summary is written is also revealing. In these three numbers it is much more argumentative rather than expositive, as had been the case in the previous instalments of the series;¹⁵ however, this more ‘sensationalist’ tone¹⁶ does not correspond with that used in the inner pages, where sensationalist news items emphasized on the front page are developed briefly and in the usual neutral tone. Here, we hazard the hypothesis that the printer, to compensate for the lack of periodicity, which had hitherto been a main claim on the front page, now used the lure of these more attractive news items for the common public.

It would therefore be easy to recognize these three final numbers as pertaining to the series that began in 1618; as an indirect test, the signature of the possible censor is present in all three.