‘Newes also came by Letters’: Functions and Features of Epistolary News in English News Publications of the Seventeenth Century

Throughout the Early Modern period English news publications make reference to letters as being a principal source of their information. The letters could be either domestic or foreign, of an official nature or private, sometimes arriving directly at the publisher’s desk or more probably amounting to the final stage of a much more circuitous route. This fundamental role of letters in the transmission of news will be examined by means of both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of electronically-readable corpora of seventeenth-century English print news. Through an examination of concordance lines containing the node word LETTER, it is possible to gain insight into not only how domestic and foreign news reached the English news editor but how this mode of transmission was then used by editors to underline the significance and reliability of the news that they sold. A study of linguistic features and pragmalinguistic strategies lets us see how letters impacted on English readers’ understanding of domestic and foreign news, and more generally the shape of Europe.