International News Flows in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Prospects

We know quite a lot about the modalities of news transmission—diplomats, postal services, scholars, diasporic ethnic and religious communities, merchants and so on—yet, in spite of the evident promise of this Braudelian theme, we know less about the overall patterns of news transmission. The availability of new corpora and new approaches suggests new routes to discovery. Here I would like to examine what has been done and point out what could be done to trace the European news networks of early modern times using a combination of methodologies. An important tool for tracing news flows is the measurement