ABSTRACT
It is only quite recently that students of Spanish history have become aware of the fact that the favourite reading matter of Spaniards in the seventeenth century was the same as that of their twentieth-century descendants. None the less, even in Spain not many people today know that there actually was such a thing as the press in the seventeenth century, let alone that it flourished. In the past fifteen years or so, however, some historians of Spanish culture have begun to wake up to the fact that the press was a major force in both the culture and the politics of the Golden Age. Indeed, the sudden recognition of its importance has started to produce fruits in the form of bibliographies, catalogues, editions, conference papers, articles, and other studies.1 It is the aim of this chapter to draw on this recent work in order to focus on some of the varied ways in which the press in seventeenth-century Spain was a vehicle for information which – like the press of other places and other times – rarely, if ever, lacked political spin.
