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âStrange newesâ: Printed news 1485â
âThe Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story
of a Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Count Draculaâ
Anon, 1485
Even before the moment when a pressman (perhaps it was Gutenberg himself, or perhaps it was Peter Schöffer, his earliest colleague) first1 pulled âthe devilâs tailâ to screw the forme holding the inked types against a sheet of paper, what we would come to think of as the news was already a tricky business. Indeed, the âfake newsâ phenomenon is not a new problem. It is not just older than Facebook et al, it is older than the newspaper itself, or the presses used to print it. To brand a broadsheet, pamphlet or bound booklet âtreweâ, âwarrented tidingsâ, âtruthsâ, âfull true and particular accountsâ, âtrue relationsâ, âvĂ©ritable contesâ was, even with the purest intentions of offering accurate and unvarnished reports, always to give hostages to fortune. Not only could such a warrant never be totally fulfilled, but the protocols deployed to indicate, fraudulently, that truths were on offer could, and were, easily aped. It doesnât take long to set in type that you are telling the truth. And, moreover, those that were to make it their business to sell the news to the public were often all too ready to present grounded and ungrounded material cheek-by-jowl.
Gutenberg, his fellow metalworkers, and the burgher manuscript book-handlers who followed him into exploring printâs potential, found in their buyers (churchmen, officials, scholars, aristocrats, lawyers, and fellow townsfolk) an appetite for bibles, psalters, and prayer books, reprints of Greek and Latin masterworks, chronicles, and grammars. Not all these âvendibleâ incunabula (print in âswaddling clothesâ) were received as socially positive. Pulling on the devilâs tail could also produce materials to do the devilâs work â playing cards, say, or frivolous fiction of only supposed moral worth (Aesopâs Fables?), or none (The Decameron). Output was often neutral in the sense that it could be seen as a social good or as a social evil. Sheet music, which, from those first days, was a profitable line for the printer to exploit, could, indeed, be sacred, but also sinfully profane. The products of the printing press, like those of the wine press on which it was modelled, were not always deemed beneficial.
Despite such misgivings, however, the church, which at first flush had heralded the coming of print as âan ascent towards Godâ, was to be printâs best customer. Apart from holy texts, indulgences, which were a prime cause of the demands for ecclesiastical reform in the century after Gutenberg, were sometimes issued one hundred thousand at a time. They were printed as a form, with a space left blank to write the name of the beneficiary who bought one. The earliest surviving example, possibly printed by Gutenberg himself, is dated 22 October 1454. A manuscript and block-printed tradition of small devotional pictures to be held as a prophylactic against plague, called pestblĂ€tter/plague-sheets, were also mass-produced.
The authorities, too, were among printâs larger customers for ephemera. Although formal legalistic need for continued face-to-face encounters and attested, sealed written documents remained, the old regal manuscript formula â âto all whom these presents shall comeâ â was soon in print. Proclamations, instructions and the like were, obviously, more efficiently printed than copied by hand. The French kings were issuing printed occasionnels â ordonnances faict par le roi nostre signeur etc. â from as early as 1467. By the 1480s these expanded to include reports of the kingâs activities â of the progress of a war in Brittany in 1488, for example. But, being official publications, they themselves do not fall within the modern western definition of journalism proper.
The voracious appetite of the printers for material to set was matched by the equally demanding public thirst for print. In addition to treasured bound books, a flood of single, largely discardable broadsheets on a wide variety of topics and other ephemera for the general market marked the first phase of print. Printers published anything they could think of: Gutenberg, for example, produced a printed calendar for 1448. Catalogues of goods, with spaces for their current prices to be inserted, speak to burgeoning commercial needs. Printed âsupplicationsâ â single page dissertations, in effect â were required by universities awarding higher degrees. In 1517, Lutherâs Disputation on the Power of Indulgences â the 95 Theses â can be considered as following this format. The hand-written original may not have actually been nailed to the church door in Wittenberg, but it was certainly quickly printed in Basel.2 With high demand ensuring the technologyâs diffusion, by the start of the 16th century more than 1,000 presses in 200 European cities and towns had produced an estimated 8 million volumes of 30,000 incunabula.3
In this flood of paper, there was printed news â broadsheet âbills of newsâ â carrying information for the edification and entertainment of the public. From the outset, they competed in print with the more substantial newsbooks. Both were produced irregularly, usually on single topics, their titles reflecting their contents, and so are not examples of the periodical press as we are describing it. That is to say that they were not regularly issued, independently edited, unbound, numbered and dated periodicals containing, under a consistent title, a variety of news reports and other matter. Contrary to received opinion, it is rather a trick of the light to see the appearance of something recognisable as a newspaper as a direct â more or less immediate â consequence of the coming of print. Most of these individual elements did appear in print persistently, but in an ad hoc fashion. They did not appear together. Far from the proliferation of printing instantly producing the news, in the form of a ânewspaperâ, it was not until the 17th century â 150 years after Gutenberg â that printed titles displaying all the characteristics we have identified came to appear regularly in a distinct class of publications. There were many reasons for this but prime among them was the existence of rival news sources.
The Middle Ages had seen the emergence of a platform for the oral expression of news, i.e. news in the sense of being public, and neither gossip nor history. Minstrels were then a new class of entertainers, in effect busking across Europe performing in street, hall and court. Among the love songs and tales of chivalry which were the mainstays of their repertoires were rhymed accounts of recent events which could also be melodically recited to earn a penny from an audience.4 From troubadours (and some female troubairitz) in 12th century Occitan France, a vibrant tradition, replete with guilds and rules, was sustained. Accounts that were âtrew y toldeâ, to use the term coined by an early 14th century English poet named Laurence Minot, were well established. Minot was writing in English, obviously from witnessed sources, rhymed reports of the military exploits of the English against the Scots and the French in the early 1330s.5 The following century, even as Gutenberg was setting up shop, another poet, Michael Beheim, was also producing rhymed reports of current events. He was a meistersinger, what troubadours had become in the German lands. During the winter of 1463, he could be found in Vienna entertaining and informing the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick von Hapsburg III, of news. In a thousand-line poem, about a wutrich (bloodthirsty madman) called the Trakle Waida (devil prince) of Wallachia, he secured for his villain, Vlad TepeÈ III, a reputation which still vibrates. His source was a hostile monk who had encountered the maniac Trakle (Dracul in Romanian), in the flesh in the Balkans.6 Beheim is but a step away from fictional imagining, his mainstream news story being not totally mendacious, but certainly significantly distorted. The roots of fake news in the mainstream media are all to be found in this contemporary account of the historical figure who would become the fictional âDraculaâ â not a lie but, at best, a necessarily partial truth.
Constantinople had fallen to the Turks in 1453 and the âmadmanâ Vlad was a real, still-living person as Michael was singing about him in distant Austria. He was, in truth, the then Voivode of Wallachia â a pawn in the tangled, fervid politics of the Balkans at the time. But he was not necessarily a particular demonic one â only an average sort of Eastern European 15th-century tyrant. Unembellished, his (actual) everyday cruelty could be seen, in terms of the standards of the time and place, as an astute deployment of terror as a means of control in a particularly lawless historical moment. Had his informant not been a hostile Catholic cleric, Beheim could just as easily have learned of Vlad as an heroic defender of Orthodox Christianity against the threat of Islam, and a significant founding father of his country. Today, his reputation runs contentiously along these two lines, either remembered more positively, in Romania and by a number of scholars of the period, or, if remembered at all, taken as Vlad the Impaler, perpetrator of horrific atrocities, by the rest of us. It was this latter take that was to influence an Irish novelist centuries later,7 who may or may not have also been principally inspired by a nightmare brought on by eating too much crab one night at dinner. That we are still making movies, games, books, breakfast cereal, etc. inspired by the figure of Dracula, may perhaps, in this context, be taken as a sign of some uncomfortable truths about fake newsâs enduring power.
Not that any positive account of Vlad would have avoided distortion, too; but, as Dr Johnson was to point out, newswriters have long believed that:
By the 20th century this had been routinised in the unavoidable tabloid injunction that âif it bleeds, it leadsâ.9
As far as we can tell from surviving documents, it was to be 22 years before an account of Vlad appeared in newsbook form. In 1485, the King of Hungary, who had been one of his many enemies, had printed Dracule Wajda, a pamphlet with a crude woodcut showing Vlad eating lunch outdoors in front of a forest of impaled bodies, while a servant chops at a pile of corpses. The tale, in German, was to be repeatedly reprinted across Europe over the next half-century, with titles such as The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Blood-Drinking Tyrant called Count Dracula.10 By that time, newsbooks were regularly appearing and they, following Dracule Wajda, soon came firmly to occupy journalismâs âinterstitial positionâ â but with a significant, although not absolute, tendency to lean towards the fake/fiction side. An analysis of 500 surviving canards â as the French termed news broadsheets â from the period, revealed the dominance of sensationalism in general: 36% were devoted to marvels, 23% to calamities,...
