ABSTRACT
For a number of centuries, or at least from the eenth to the eighteenth, European political information took the material form of handwritten newssheets in which political and military news, likely to be of public interest, were collected periodically. Hence a market for information originated and developed over a long period of time, characterized by manual reproduction, which, as we shall see, had considerable advantages over printed forms. Printed gazettes became widespread from the rst decades of the seventeenth century; but in the period under examination here these were entirely dependent upon the handwritten versions.1
