The Center for the Study of Early Modern News (CEMNE)

Steering committee

Stefano Villani (villani@umd.edu)
Brendan Dooley (B.Dooley@ucc.ie)

The Center for the Study of Early Modern News (CEMNE) investigates the circulation, production, and reception of news in early modern Europe across multiple media—handwritten newsletters (avvisi), printed broadsheets and gazettes, pamphlets, diplomatic dispatches, and other textual forms. By examining how political, diplomatic, religious, and commercial information was disseminated, CEMNE explores the ways news shaped public knowledge, influenced opinion, and served both as a tool of governance and control and as an instrument of dissent and resistance.

Manuscript newsletters occupied a central place in this ecosystem. Typically anonymous, written in the third person, and circulated weekly, they conveyed both verified events and unconfirmed rumors. Read in courts, religious institutions, and merchant communities, they provided a steady flow of information long before the advent of the periodical press. Seventeenth-century printed news often drew directly from these manuscripts, while the newsletter format itself endured into the eighteenth century and beyond, partly because it could circumvent censorship.

Despite their importance, many early modern news sources remain understudied and difficult to access. Their dispersal across archives, together with the challenges of early modern handwriting, has hindered large-scale comparative study. CEMNE addresses this gap by combining historical research with digital humanities and artificial intelligence methods, working in close partnership with historians, paleographers, computer scientists, and archival institutions.

The Center’s institutional framework brings together three principal partners: University College Cork, the Department of History at the University of Maryland, and the Medici Archive Project. Each provides expertise and infrastructure to support a long-term research agenda on the history of media, digital transcription, and the analysis of news cultures and networks in seventeenth-century Europe.

Research Methodology

CEMNE develops and applies AI-based tools for the transcription and analysis of early modern handwriting, specifically tailored to manuscript newsletters from the seventeenth century. These tools are integrated into a digital platform designed to enable the structured transcription of archival documents and the linking of manuscript news to printed counterparts, diplomatic records, and broader textual corpora. The aim is to facilitate historical, linguistic, and quantitative research on the forms, content, and circulation of news before the rise of the printing press.

The digital infrastructure supports the annotation of persons, places, and topics, as well as the encoding of texts in XML formats compatible with international standards. The approach combines paleographical precision with data-driven analysis and is oriented toward the reconstruction of historical information flows in early modern Europe.

The EURONEWS and Salvetti Projects

Among CEMNE’s foundational initiatives is the EURONEWS Project, directed by Professor Brendan Dooley (University College Cork) and funded by the Irish Research Council. The project focuses on the transcription and analysis of the Medici newsletters sent from major European cities—Paris, London, Vienna, and others—to the Tuscan court. These newsletters, housed in the Mediceo del Principato series at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, constitute a critical source for the study of European political communication, diplomatic networks, and media practices in the early modern period.

An integral component of this initiative is the Salvetti Project, based on the correspondence and newsletters of Amerigo Salvetti, Medici Resident in London from 1618 until his death in 1657, and of his son Giovanni Salvetti Antelminelli, who held the same post until 1680. This body of documentation spans the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the early Restoration, offering a unique Italian perspective on British political developments in a time when colonial endeavors (including in America) are gaining importance. The Salvetti correspondence consists of over 1,700 documents, including roughly 500 manuscript newsletters. These are being transcribed, edited, and published on the digital platform of the Medici Archive Project (mia.medici.org), in collaboration with Professor Stefano Villani (Department of History, University of Maryland). All materials are processed according to current standards in digital scholarly editing and are intended to support further inquiry in both historical and computational fields.

Scholarly Significance and Objectives

The work of CEMNE contributes to several areas of historical and interdisciplinary scholarship. First, it enables the empirical study of how information was produced, disseminated, and received in a Europe without a unified press. Second, it provides critical insights into the mechanisms of censorship, propaganda, and political surveillance in the seventeenth century. Third, by linking manuscript and printed materials, the Center facilitates a reassessment of media history beyond the traditional focus on typography.

Beyond its contribution to historical knowledge, CEMNE also serves as a site for methodological development in digital humanities. The Center promotes the use of computational techniques in historical research and supports the training of scholars in the transcription and analysis of early modern sources through digital tools. It also contributes to the long-term preservation of a corpus of materials that have hitherto remained largely inaccessible, thereby reinforcing efforts to document and interpret Europe’s early information networks in a time of global expansion.

The Center functions as both a research hub and a digital laboratory, advancing the historical understanding of news and communication in early modern Europe while building open-access infrastructures that enable new forms of scholarly engagement with archival sources.

Impact and Outreach

To draw attention to the Center’s work, there may be dedicated panels in major scholarly
meetings, seminars, workshops, as well as blog posts and podcasts featured on the Center
web page, along with social media presence to draw attention to these, in the hope that the
importance and wide implications of the chosen research focus will become more widely
known.