ABSTRACT
A denitive treatment of the spread of news in seventeenth-century Europe is still a project for future generations of scholars. e challenges are both practical and conceptual. By practical we mean in particular the still pressing need to identify and make accessible the sources of the news and analyze their interrelationships. While there is reasonably good bibliographic control over early newspapers (to the extent that we now know at least where to nd the majority of the extant copies and know what some of the major gaps are), we are less well served for published separates.2 Our knowledge of manuscript sources for the news and
1 e authors presented this paper at the 2007 conference in Bremen, “Places of News: e Creation of International News Networks in Early Modern Times,” although it incorporates ideas from their contribution entitled “Did ‘Contemporaneity’ Emerge in Early Modern Russia?,” presented at the 2006 Bremen conference “Time and Space on the Way to Modernity.”
