This is a past event
Wed 3rd March
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Dr Kirsty Rolfe (Leiden),
'Itching ears: Desire for news in the 1620s'
In the early 1620s, a flood of foreign news entered England, dealing with the war in Bohemia and Germany (the beginnings of the conflict that would later become known as the Thirty Years’ War). This news entered into existing frameworks of understanding, stigmatising, and satirising news, and those who desired to hear or read it. This paper focuses on a prevalent early modern metaphor for the desire for news, itself drawn from the bible: that of having ‘itching ears’, greedy of novelty. It examines how this metaphor was applied to desire for foreign news in the 1620s, and the connotations that it brought with it: of discomfort, of uncontrollable bodily desire, of insatiability. It also explores how – faced with unprecedented developments in the volume and format of foreign news available to interested consumers – this metaphor itself developed, and how some writers adapted it in order to justify desire for news as (in certain circumstances) religiously- and civically-responsible.
Kirsty Rolfe is University Lecturer at Leiden University. She is an Associate Editor on the Thomas Nashe Project, for which she is editing Nashe’s The Anatomie of Absurditie. She has published articles on plague and on military news reports, and is currently working on a book about news, providence, and emotion in the Thirty Years War.
If you require help please contact zuzanna.muszynska@abdn.ac.uk
- Speaker
- Dr Kirsty Rolfe