Sublime

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

For half a century or more thereafter printers would follow a very conservative strategy, concentrating on publishing editions of the books most familiar from the medieval manuscript tradition.1 But in the sixteenth century they would also begin to open up new markets – and one of these was a market for news. News fitted ideally into the expanding

sources in any but the

the equivalent of 140,000 Library of Congress collections.1 Growth

Although many of the pasquinades were bitingly topical, the confusion of the two forms was unfair. The avvisi could be cynical, but with rare exceptions were not openly offensive. Their value lay in their reliability as news; the writers could not exaggerate for effect, nor indulge in wishful thinking. In the clear distance between the avvisi and p

2002, and compare the result with the information accumulated from

misreading the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

The ebb and flow of pamphlet warfare mirrored closely the rhythms of the conflict. French campaigning in Italy produced a flurry of publications in 1516 and 1528–9. On the imperial side the interconnected events of 1527–9, with the coronation of Ferdinand I as King of Hungary closely followed by the renewal of the French War, produced a comparable