The Fuggerzeitungen. An early modern informative medium and its indexing

In recent years, historical research in the German-speaking world and beyond has commensurately focussed on the study of communication and the media through history. From "private" exchanges of letters to "public" media, the field as we expect it to be stretches to encompass the origins of the newspaper. While the first printed newspaper in Europe was launched in 1605 in Strasburg, hand-written "avvisi", which were commercial products similar to newspapers, had at that time been in existence for decades. The purpose of the project is to inventory the most prominent "hand-written newspaper" information media from the early modern period, so as to facilitate their use for historical research, thus also improving the quality of said research. This is about the so-called Fuggerzeitungen, a collection of hand-written newspapers put together by the brothers Octavian Secundus and Philipp Edward Fugger. It covers 16,021 newspapers from 1568 to 1605. Originally part of the Fuggerschen library, the 27 folios in which the newspapers are collected have been at the imperial library of the Vienna since 1656. The news collected in there cover what was the known world at the time. They come from the main commercial and information centres of Europe (most newspapers originate in Antwerp, Rome, Venice and Cologne, followed by Lyon, Vienna and Prague), but also from overseas, from India and the Middle-East. This stock of sources, which in the fields of press research, literary research and historical research is often mentioned but rarely studied, will have its content evaluated as follows: firstly, investigating how hand-written newspapers treated topics ranging from war reports to courtly culture and ceremony, in the still-developing framework of media freedom. On the other hand, the connection of the Fuggerzeitungen to news-swapping networks in the early modern period will be evaluated by comparison to the collection of the Electors of Saxony in Dresden, another relevant newspaper collection. The content of this study will therefore give a clear picture of the entire Viennese stock. In cooperation with the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the Austrian National Library, the newspapers will be digitize and their text will become fully accessible through the manuscript catalogue of the Austrian National Library. The catalogue (HANNA, aka ÖVK-NAH) to which the Fuggerzeitungen belong is freely accessible online through the Austrian National Library, which means that researchers from the various scientific fields will be able to use the search functions on the newspapers` tables of contents and use the texts in a well-coordinated way.

To this day, newspapers are an integral part of our daily lives and our media landscape, although electronic media as well as social media have been changing communication and the exchange of information fundamentally in the past years. But since when have periodically published news media like newspapers even existed, and how did they originate? Until now, the emergence of a periodic press in Europe is commonly linked to the year 1605, when the first printed weekly newspaper appeared in Strasbourg. The recently completed project presented herein, however, dealt with the decades immediately before that date during which social elites were informed about current events through handwritten newspapers. The fact that this handwritten medium played a substantial role in the development of the modern press has hitherto been addressed in research only rarely and in very general terms.The central point of departure for this project was one of the most prominent collections of such handwritten newspapers in the German-speaking world: the so-called Fuggerzeitungen or Fugger newspapers. This collection, part of the imperial library in Vienna since the 17th century, includes more than 15,000 newspapers in German and Italian from the years 1568 to 1604, thereby documenting precisely the time prior to the appearance of printed newspapers. With the 27 volumes resulting from the collection activities by the brothers Octavian Secundus and Philipp Eduard Fugger in Augsburg, such a corpus has now been completely digitized and made accessible for the first time: A database allows the newspapers to be searched by persons, places and dates; maps provide new approaches to the information network and the transmission of news throughout Europe and the entire world known at the time. Researchers and interested laypersons alike now have worldwide access to the collection, thereby allowing its use as a source as well as for academic teaching purposes. Simultaneously, the project focused on the historic contextualization of the collection hitherto generally viewed as an exception or unique specimen. To this end, further newspaper collections in the German-speaking area and in Italy were sought out; these were then compared to the Fugger newspapers and the corpora examined for connections. From this resulted new findings regarding the processes of news transfer within Europe as well as the embedding of the handwritten newspaper within the early modern media landscape of handwritten and printed texts along with orally transmitted informations. New insights were also gained on the relevance of such newspapers for the practice of regular media consumption and the specificity of the medium in the transfer between Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as on the differing information cultures north and south of the Alps. In light of these results, the year 1605 as the birthdate of the European press may well be put up for further discussion.