PART 2 Modes
PART 2 Modes ∵ <UN> chapter 10 The History of a Word: Gazzetta / Gazette Mario Infelise The term gazette and its variants in some of the European languages— gazzetta in Italian, gazette in French and English, gaceta in Spanish, gazetten in German, though this is less common—defined a new medium of informa tion which developed in Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies. The goal of this chapter is to try and reconstruct the history of this word until 1631, when it became the title of the most important printed news sheet of the Kingdom of France and assumed its current meaning. This could offer a different approach to the evolution of the phenomenon of public infor mation in the early modern age, able to explain some interesting aspects of its development. My aims are as follows: first, to deconstruct the etymological history of the term gazzetta, beginning with contemporary dictionaries; and second, to establish the differences between the respective systems of the gazzetta and the avviso. It should be remembered that the system of avvisi existed from at least the fifteenth century, but was mostly the concern of courts and princes, and political and religious circles more generally. On the other hand, the gazettes, as we will see, bring about the emergence of a new public. My exami nations of both terms exclusively concern only handwritten newsletters which supplied news on a regular basis. As is well known, the printing of gazettes is a phenomenon that began in the first decades of the seventeenth century, but was not in itself particularly innovative.
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