Soundscapes in the early modern world research seminar

Jan-Friedrich Mißfelder (University of Basel)

Una McIlvenna (Australian National University)

Rachel Willie (Liverpool John Moores University, Chair)

Some of the earliest forms of news dissemination occurred in ballads. Lacking a teleological relationship with newsbooks, these forms of news production created spaces for engagement with topicality through enabling listeners to hear the news. Yet Laurence Price’s A New Dialogue Between Dick of Kent, and Wat the Welch-man’ (London, 1654) begins with Wat telling Dick, if his ‘News be so good, let [Wat] hear [him] read it’ (A3v). Utterance spreads news but singing and speaking the news are each inflected with resonances that highlight the generic and sonic differences between news ballads and other forms of news production. Ballad tunes emphasised and made meaning, highlighting how integral song was to this mode of communication. Drawing together leading scholars of news ballads and sound, this roundtable discussion will attend to news dissemination in early modern Europe. Taking stock of recent developments in early modern news and sound studies, conversations will assess how news singing created communities, meaning and forms of association.

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Sounding the News in Early Modern Europe