The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book' 
Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement 
 
News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel. 
 
This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language. 
 
Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment

Highly ambitious and impressive …  here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount

Monumental and mesmerising ... Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work

Capacious in structure, monumental in volume

Utopian is the ambition to write a history of news, that most quicksilver of commodities, and Raymond Wren has knowingly attempted the impossible ... The Great Exchange must be counted a triumphant success

Joad Raymond Wren is a writer and historian of early modern Europe who has taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Paris-Sorbonne and Queen Mary University of London. His previous books include The Invention of the Newspaper, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, Milton's Angels and, as editor, Making the News, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1600, News Networks in Early Modern Europe and The Complete Works of John Milton: Latin Defences, as well as the novel All the Colours You Cannot Name.

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book' 
Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement 
 
News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel. 
 
This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language. 
 
Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

Joad Raymond Wren

Scintillating ... the book rises up as a monument against our age of short-termism

Travels to the Limits of Thought

Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy. It runs through history and literature from Plato to Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish to Ursula Le Guin. Utopia, this book shows, was for them a tool for exploring the horizons of thought, asking the unaskable and challenging entrenched assumptions about how society has to be. 
 
The Uses of Utopia travels not only to the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also the places where those inspired by visions of perfection tried to establish them, from the egalitarian communities built in colonial Mexico to the novelist Étienne Cabet’s disastrous attempt to realize socialism on the Mississippi. We see the groundbreaking ideas, about liberty and the law, sex and the sexes, work and wealth, that imagining an ideal society made possible. We hear the voices of radicals of many kinds talking freely to each other - and also to us. Here, in our imperfect world, how will you use utopia?

Joad Raymond Wren

Praise for The Uses of Utopia

Richly diverting intellectual history

Scintillating ... the book rises up as a monument against our age of short-termism

Books by Joad Raymond Wren

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