ABSTRACT
The sixteenth-century adaptability of the term New World, aptly illustrating the concepts of discovery and newness can be challenged, appropriated, and played with, appears in Charles Fontaines Les nouvelles, & Antiques merveilles. That newness-related arguments are on display in the paratext of aging. Yet newly printed, editions of medieval texts whether or not the latter are updated corroborates McLuhans argument: the staging of newness, and of its discovery, are ostensibly functions of print-culture processes themselves. However, the format employed to convey newness and to emulate the act of discovery is first and foremost that of the occasionnel. Yet the staging of the act of discovery is in fact quite common in news bulletins, from the sighting and report of comets, deformed stillborns, and fallen cities, to exclusive prophecies and the promulgation of competing cures to new diseases. Their display is concomitant with the advent of print culture and the invention of copyrights in early-modern France, by the granting of privilges.
