The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 1

All in all, the volume provides a systematic overview of the field of historical news discourse in its earliest period. Extending the empirical scope to cover regional Irish, Scottish and Welsh sources and devoting space to hitherto non-mainstream topics in historical media studies (e.g. consequences of the coexistence of manuscript and print, the versatile roles of women, the integral place of specialised registers) constitute the greatest strengths of the volume. Another great strength lies in the broad contextualisation of both the individual themes and the historiography of news discourse. [...] The volume provides a rich array of answers to the question how different historical news was to contemporary consumers, serving their modern counterparts with plenty of food for thought. -- Matylda Ewa Włodarczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University * English Language and Linguistics *
This volume is an impressive achievement in early modern British and Irish periodical history. Its twentyseven essays and twenty-three case studies cover a wide variety of periodical print genres, episodic explications of periodical history, and material contexts for periodical print across the British Isles during the transformative period from 1640 to 1800. More generally, Brownlees has managed to communicate a coherent sense of key trends in print history via these fifty contributions. For scholars interested in eighteenth-century Scottish periodical history specifically, the volume manages to balance impressive overviews like those from Rhona Brown, Stephen Brown, and Mark Spencer with more focused case studies of periodical print issues as inflected via material distribution, genre, and national identity. All those with an interest in eighteenth-century Scotland will clearly benefit from this volume’s multifarious investigations of the nation’s periodical print culture. -- Alex Benchimol, University of Glasgow * Eighteenth-Century Scotland *
This is an indispensable collection, which skilfully maps the territory of news in early modern Britain, explores the central issues involved, and surveys a burgeoning historiography. At the same time, it also presents a wealth of striking evidence drawn from cutting-edge research, and highlights numerous avenues for further investigation. Essential reading. -- Jason Peacey, UCL