'Receiving him in the open field' : The Viennese origins of royal reporting in the seventeenth-century newspaper press

Arblaster, Paul
(2026) La cour se met au vert (II). Arts, diplomatie et politique à la campagne (Europe XVe-XVIIe siècles) — Location: Mons - Mariemont (19.March.2026)

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Through the development of the news press, the urban middle classes of seventeenth-century Europe were provided with ever more detailed and up-to-date information about the doings of their rulers. As ephemeral publications, the earliest newspapers seldom survive in large numbers, but an unusually complete run of Antwerp’s Nieuwe Tijdinghen (1620-1629) has been preserved. A substantial part of news coverage, in this and other newspapers, was routinely devoted to the public actions and declarations of monarchs, and every detail would be teased out when there were major events in their family life, such as births, weddings and funerals. Alongside such news, Antwerp readers were only very occasionally informed of the bucolic pastimes of monarchs such as Philip IV, Louis XIII, and James I, but were more frequently updated, primarily through translations of reports from Vienna, about the rural recreations and devotions — sleigh rides, hunting parties, pilgrimages — of the imperial court of Ferdinand II. These accounts not only reported what the emperor and other members of his household were doing ‘for recreation and exercise’ in the countryside, but also regularly specified the ambassadors, courtiers or supplicants who had accompanied the imperial party on these pursuits. In the news culture of the time, such details were understood to provide oblique insight into the more opaque decision-making processes that were regarded as mysteries of state, giving clues as to what public actions and declarations might be expected in the near future. The reports published in Antwerp show that a decade before Théophraste Renaudot launched the Parisian Gazette, the contours of royal reporting in earlier newspapers were already being shaped by Viennese news practices.
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Arblaster, P. (2026, March 20). ‘Receiving him in the open field’ : The Viennese origins of royal reporting in the seventeenth-century newspaper press. La cour se met au vert (II). Arts, diplomatie et politique à la campagne (Europe XVe-XVIIe siècles), Mons - Mariemont. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/276151