The Great Exchange

Making the News in Early Modern Europe

Joad Raymond Wren

$90

Hardback

In stock
Ready to ship

QTY:

English

Allen Lane
14 October 2025

History; European history

An epic history of the birth of news in Europe

'Highly ambitious and impressive ... a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book' Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement

News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel.

This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language.

Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news - of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna - spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts- communication.

By: Joad Raymond Wren
Imprint: Allen Lane
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 164mm, Spine: 39mm
Weight: 1.057kg
ISBN: 9780241188538
ISBN 10: 0241188539
Pages: 624
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Joad Raymond Wren is a writer and historian of early modern Europe who has taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia and Queen Mary University of London. His previous books include Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain, The Invention of the Newspaper and Milton's Angels.

Reviews for The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

Bold in conception, magisterial in its command of vast swathes of evidence and brimming with clever ideas, it is a formidable accomplishment -- John Adamson * Literary Review * Highly ambitious and impressive … here is a book that anyone and everyone interested in early-modern Europe will enjoy reading, and from which they will learn a huge amount -- Noel Malcolm * Times Literary Supplement * Monumental and mesmerising ... Raymond Wren has produced a transformative work -- Peter Marshall * History Today * Capacious in structure, monumental in volume -- Minoo Dinshaw * Spectator * Utopian is the ambition to write a history of news, that most quicksilver of commodities, and Raymond Wren has knowingly attempted the impossible ... The Great Exchange must be counted a triumphant success -- Daniel Johnson * The Critic *