ABSTRACT
Awareness of their target audience was vitally important to the authors writing about North America during the first half of the seventeenth century. Not every author declared his audience as explicitly as the writer of this Virginia Company broadside, and sometimes we have to deduce the intended readership. One method is to examine the medium in which the text was reproduced. Another is to analyse the cost and means of production: the cheaper the product, the more widely available it was. After 1638, when the first American printing press was established, the choice made by authors to distribute their texts in England and not in the colonies, is also significant. With other concerns foremost in the minds of Englishmen, many people had little interest in the New World, but there were networks of readers who pursued information on North America, and formed communication connections that were utilized to spread the word. e relationship between the book and manuscript trades in London and those in the provinces can provide answers as to how the East Anglian Puritans learned enough about New England to choose that region to build their ‘city on a hill’.
