Newsletters in Tudor England: The correspondence of Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury
Keywords:
newsletters, political news, news circulation, women’s correspondence, Tudor England, Elizabeth Talbot, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I Tudor, French wars of religionAbstract
The article is focused on the history of news in Early Modern Europe, namely the history of newsletters — the predecessors of newspapers, which informed Europeans about current political affairs. Until quite recently it was widely accepted that only men read newsletters because they were interested in political events. In the last decade, however, studies of female epistolary culture have demonstrated that women also were part of the newsletters’ audience. The article presents an analysis of newsletters sent to Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527–1608). Her correspondence is much better preserved than letter archives of any other woman of Tudor England. Five surviving newsletters from the Shrewsbury archive were addressed to the Countess by Hugh Fitzwilliam and written between 1569 and 1574. These letters contain domestic political news, as well as news from abroad. Analysis of the letters makes it possible to conclude that in the 1570s the news format available to Englishmen and Englishwomen was not yet a specialized news bulletin but newsletters sent from clients to patrons. In these letters, the news was focused on topics that were of interest to the patrons, and that could be explored in more detail on demand. The case of the Countess of Shrewsbury demonstrates that aristocratic women were interested in the same political topics as were the men of their families, and, like the men, ordered, consumed and disseminated the news.Downloads
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