The Netherlands in the news. Italian messages, opinions and histories about the Eighty Years'War (ca. 1560 - ca. 1640).

Contemporaries considered the Eighty Years War as a European conflict of exceptional importance. They often wrote about it. This is especially true for Italian authors. They produced a great variety of texts in different genres, e.g. avvisi or hand-written newsletters, journals, history books, political and philosophical treatises. This information stream satisfied the curiosity of the Italian public. But it had as well a practical goal. Many Italians were involved in the war, either as soldiers or as providers of all kinds of services to the belligerent parties. Policy makers and merchants took decisions on their eventual participation in the conflict on the basis of the available information. Some Italian observers described as well the political institutions of the nascent Dutch Republic. Their texts contributed to the slow erosion of monarchical power in the Italian regional states, where memories of civic humanism had not yet disappeared. In the remaining aristocratic republics such texts offered comparison to the local ruling elites. This project aims to identify the authors of this information stream and to analyse their texts. In this way it will reconstruct the Italian debates on the Eighty Years War. The project thus will enhance our knowledge on various aspects of cultural, social and political history. Moreover we shall gain a better understanding op the early modern market for information.

Keywords:History of mass media, Early moder Italian literature, Dutch revolt, Early Modern History

Disciplines:History, Theory and methodology of philosophy