'True news, marvellous wonders' at the BNE
It was the event of the millennium, the invention that enabled the giant leap from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age. The printing press, comparable to the emergence of the internet and global communication in the 20th century, brought about the greatest social, cultural and economic change in humanity since the 15th century. Knowledge left the monasteries and the palaces of the elites, and everyday events were disseminated more and more quickly and widely to all peoples and geographical locations far apart.
The accounts of events are considered to be the earliest examples of journalism as we know it today, and it is these origins that are on display in the exhibition True news, marvellous prodigies, which can be seen until 12 June at the National Library of Spain. Curated by Adelaida Caro and Nieves Pena Sueiro, it offers a carefully chosen selection of documents that start from the "relationships", living testimony of the need of the population to know something more about the events, festivals, celebrations, catastrophes, epidemics, frightening cases and even fantastic stories that fed the conversation.
Notices, letters, reports of events, news, gazettes and mercurios have been the earliest examples of news literature since the early days of manual printing. The exhibition shows us that by the end of the 16th century there was already a consolidated publishing business in the peninsula, especially active in Seville, Barcelona, Lisbon and Madrid, although it was the 17th century that would prove decisive for the evolution of journalism in Spain. It was at this time that figures such as Andrés de Almansa y Mendoza, one of the first professional journalists and author of a large number of printed reports, emerged, and the first printed information periodical, the Gaceta de Roma (1618), was published in Valencia.
The exhibition explains with numerous printed and audiovisual documents that, after timid attempts at periodicity, the first official gazette was born in 1661 in the Barcelona printing house of Jaume Romeu: the "Relationship or Gazette of notable things". Subsequently, the Burgundian Francisco Fabro Bremundián, aware of the lucrative profits to be made in the information market, obtained the privilege of printing gazettes in 1677, becoming the first official gazetteer of the Kingdom of Spain.
The visitor thus has before him an informative panorama that crosses the Golden Age, can look at manuscript testimonies, Gothic sheets and even the first printed serials, with an enormous variety of themes, and observe the peculiarities of the reports of festivals, which frequently complete the information with engravings, poetic compositions created for the event, jousting and even the costumes worn by those who boasted at the time of being the first to have heard the news of the event in question. In this respect, the model of the Convent of San Felipe el Real, founded in Madrid in 1546 at the junction of Calle Mayor and Puerta del Sol, is particularly interesting and illustrative. Its steps were the main Mentidero of the Villa de Madrid, where its inhabitants met to converse and exchange news and rumours. Both the steps of the stairs leading up to the church and the small rooms of the interior space, where merchants and traders would set up shop, were the ideal place for this.
A visual journey through the history of communication and news, in which small anonymous pieces are exhibited, printed on loose sheets or sheets of string, to reports written by illustrious humanists such as Álvar Gómez de Castro or López de Hoyos, or poets such as Lope de Vega and Quevedo.
An exercise, then, in historical memory, the first stones in short of our current history, the one that is written with the help of computer systems, tweets or intoxicating and disinformative "bots", whose antecedents can be found in this exhibition of the BNE, possessing more than 4,000 documents, a living account of the events that brought together the common and daily concerns of the people.