Author: Brendan Dooley

Historians spend a lot of time trying to piece things together. Like Sherlock Holmes, in a famous analogy suggested by Carlo Ginzburg, they view assorted vaguely related clues and from these they derive possible hypotheses about how to put together…

When the newsletter breaks into verse, we must be in the court of the Sun King! There at least, or close by, is where this Paris newsletter originates, now conserved in Mediceo del Principato vol. 4891.  The year is 1661…

Sometimes we find avvisi organized in the most curious ways.  Consider this example from MdP 4891, beginning at fol. 1056r.  On the left we have the first page of the writing, headed with “De Paris le 7e Mars 1661” (From…

The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis between France and Spain, leaving the latter power dominant in Italy after the decades-long Italian wars, was concluded on the 2nd and 3rd of April 1559.  All that was left was to work out the details. …

“The mail from Milan which arrived on Thursday evening said that they burned one of the witches they had in jail, who among other nefarious deeds confessed to having perpetrated 150 homicides of little children.”An appalling indictment, described in this…

Copies of newsletters exist throughout the archives, since handwritten newsletters were a business, whereby writers and scribes produced multiple exemplars for sending out to their lists of subscribers.  Copies might be copied up in turn, by whoever wished to send…

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.5168529As an instrument of communication, the avviso had advantages and disadvantages. Advantages included the simple technology, the straightforward easily recognizable format adaptable to any time or place, the relative freedom of expression accorded to nonprint media, the anonymity, the odor…