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Part of
News with an Attitude: Ideological perspectives in the historical press
Edited by Claudia Claridge
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 105] 2025
► pp. 108–132

Chapter 6
Revolutionary news

Reporting civil unrest in 1640s London and Naples

| University College Cork
| Irish Research Council
News travelled quickly during the troubled 1640s in Europe and had almost palpable effects. But how did news travel, and who got it first? Weekly handwritten newsletters transmitted from sites of crisis to the Tuscan Grand Ducal court and elsewhere, are a still under-used source. This chapter analyses the similarities and differences between weekly handwritten news reporting about two places, London and Naples, both of which experienced regime-changing commotions in the 1640s, among others similarly afflicted at the time. More concretely, we will be comparing and contrasting these two cases of popular unrest resulting in the creation of new forms of government, and the linguistic ramifications of this in the realms of diction, word usage, sentiment and sense of belonging.
Keywords: revolution, history, crisis, handwritten newsletters, media history, Naples, England, Florence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Handwritten newsletters: Genre and dynamics
  • 3.Revolutionary news
  • 4.Neapolitan Revolution news
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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