News on the Road. The Mobility of Handwritten Newsletters in Early Modern Europe

Handwritten newsletters (avvisi in Italian, geschriebene Zeitungen in German, cartas de aviso in Spanish, nouvelles à la main in French), namely manuscript sheets containing fresh news that kept Europeans updated about current events from the mid-sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, help us to reflect on the implications of a mobilities turn in history from both a material and an epistemological perspective. By focussing on the materiality of the news, the trajectories of its production and spread, and its translation, I show that news was intrinsically mobile well before the Enlightenment, that its circulation was facilitated by relative stable infrastructures such as the postal network, and later surely by printing, but that it is not bound to them. It is rather based on micro-technologies of text-transfer and translations that European news-writers of the 16th and 17th centuries most probably shared with other writers around the world. Through a concrete reading of several brief excerpts of news, written by news-writers who in most cases never left their workshops, I try to demonstrate that the mobility of handwritten news is not an argument against the notion of veracity or certainty, and propose to reverse a topos in the history of information that has long connected handwritten forms of communication with private, secret or less reliable interpretations of facts. Small movements of text and meaning highlight the constructive and complex processes through which facts were created in the past, and how the notion of reliability has emerged from the comparison among written, printed and heard news.