Divine, Deadly or Disastrous? Diarists’ Emotional Responses to Printed News in Sixteenth-Century France

Abstract

This essay explores how sixteenth-century French diarists responded to a range of events that were presented to them through print media. French print publishing was centrally concerned with disseminating news of the military and religio-political events that engulfed France in the second half of the century. There has been little scholarly work to date analysing who was reading such works, how they accessed them, and how they responded emotionally to the information that these texts contained, particularly beyond the milieu of elite men in the capital. Examining a range of manuscript journals by women and men, in the provinces as well as the capital and at court, this essay analyses the emotional dimensions of collection and reading of contemporary printed news for sixteenth-century diarists. It argues that emotional responses to printed news were formed by confessional affiliations that saw readers understand contemporary events in terms that ranged from divine protection to apocalyptic signs.