Evening News: Optics, Astronomy, and Journalism in Early Modern Europe

Eileen Reeves examines a web of connections between journalism, optics, and astronomy in early modern Europe, devoting particular attention to the ways in which a long-standing association of reportage with covert surveillance and astrological prediction was altered by the near simultaneous emergence of weekly newsheets, the invention of the Dutch telescope, and the appearance of Galileo Galilei's astronomical treatise, The Starry Messenger.

Early modern news writers and consumers often understood journalistic texts in terms of recent developments in optics and astronomy, Reeves demonstrates, even as many of the first discussions of telescopic phenomena such as planetary satellites, lunar craters, sunspots, and comets were conditioned by accounts of current events. She charts how the deployment of particular technologies of vision--the telescope and the camera obscura--were adapted to comply with evolving notions of objectivity, censorship, and civic awareness. Detailing the differences between various types of printed and manuscript news and the importance of regional, national, and religious distinctions, Evening News emphasizes the ways in which information moved between high and low genres and across geographical and confessional boundaries in the first decades of the seventeenth century.

Author: Eileen Reeves
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 04/23/2014
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.37w x 1.18d
ISBN: 9780812245745

Review Citation(s):
Choice 10/01/2014 pg. 281

About the Author
Eileen Reeves is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and author of Galileo's Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror.