A New Golden Age for Newspaper Research

In May 2017, scholars of Dutch and Flemish media history gathered at the University of Amsterdam to celebrate the appearance of Arthur der Weduwen’s bibliography of early Netherlandish newspapers: Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century.1 It should not be surprising that this event caused considerable excitement amongst those present. In two massive folio volumes, Dutch and Flemish Newspapers lists all the surviving issues of newspapers that appeared between 1618 and 1700, many of which had been unknown before. It also includes a hefty introduction on Low Countries newspaper history, and a range of shorter, introductory essays on every single newspaper title known to have been published in the period. Greatly extending the foundational work by the Swedish scholar Folke Dahl, whose bibliography of Dutch corantos had been the standard reference work for decades, Der Weduwen’s seminal piece of scholarship transformed the field, heralding a new age of newspaper research. The essays assembled in this issue of Early Modern Low Countries are the product of that celebratory meeting. While the contributing authors could not yet fully profit from the new bibliography, they exemplify that the history of news in the Low Countries is still very much work in progress, and are providing a taste of the kind of work that can be expected in the near future. Indeed, the significance of Der Weduwen’s book is not only the wealth of information it offers on the earliest Dutch-language newspapers, but also that it is a huge impetus to new research on Low Countries as well as European press history. Much of that development, dependent as it is on international collaboration and digitization projects, can be confidently predicted. Yet the new bibliography also shows us that in the case of the Low Countries press history, basic discoveries based on painstaking archival research can still be made. Thus Der Weduwen was the first to prove the existence of a newspaper in Utrecht as early 1623, thirty-five years earlier than had previously been thought, through a discovery in the municipal archives of Deventer.2