The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (26 page)

From the Pulpit

Not everyone observed this passion for news with enthusiasm. The minister George Widley was far less indulgent. His sour view of his parishioners was that ‘if any question shall be put concerning religion, they grow as mute as fishes’. But not so for news: ‘they rehearse and tell nothing but gossips’ tales, and news, that love to have their tongues to run through the world, and meddling in other man's matters’.
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This frustration was widely shared in the preaching ministry; but it should not obscure the fact that the pulpit was itself an important conduit for news. One day a week the minister owned the public platform, with the opportunity to put aside the disorderly hubbub of the streets, and impose some sort of meaning on everyday events.

In the sixteenth century, and particularly in Protestant northern Europe, the sermon became an important part of the weekly round. This was a new development: for medieval Christianity, the sermon had been a part of public festival culture, but a sporadic one.
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On such occasions a sermon would often be delivered by a visitor, for example a travelling mendicant monk. The best preachers were great masters of theatre, not least the theatre of suspense. News of their coming to the neighbourhood would be eagerly passed around the marketplace; their arrival would be impossible to miss, since the most celebrated preachers picked up a considerable caravan of followers in the course of their travels, trailing them from place to place. To prevent the sermon becoming an undignified scrum, senior clerics would negotiate their arrival in advance. This was the case with the great master of the indulgence campaign, Raymond Peraudi, whose appearances were carefully orchestrated in a flurry of printed pamphlets.
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So at this level a sermon was always news, and as often as not it was preached in the town's most prominent public space. This tradition finds its memorial in the external stone pulpits built into the walls of a number of European churches, precisely to facilitate such outdoor preaching.

The great achievement of the Protestant Reformation was to make the sermon an integral part of the service of worship.
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This brought the sermon indoors; it also passed responsibility for preaching to the clergy in general, rather than a small cadre of preaching specialists. This had advantages and disadvantages. For parishioners the weekly act of worship became more participatory and comprehensible. Rather than being mere observers of a Mass conducted in Latin, they now sang, recited prayers and listened. They became a more informed but also a more demanding audience. For the minister was required not simply to intone the liturgy and perform the Mass: he was expected to expound the word of God.

In the first years of the Reformation, preaching was itself the event. The first inkling that many congregations would have that a change in their religious practice was imminent was when their priest, often more austerely dressed than usual, mounted the pulpit to proclaim his allegiance to ‘the pure Gospel’. These conversion events were essential to the survival of Luther's movement. No major city in Germany adhered to the Reformation without the support of a prominent local minister, sometimes leading a local evangelical movement in bold defiance of still reluctant magistrates. As the Reformation became entrenched, the ministers became essentially agents of the state, their pulpits a conduit for official policy. As salaried officials they were expected to support magisterial efforts to promote good order, preaching obedience and reproving vice. Thus religion and politics became inextricably intertwined.

The leading figures of the new Protestant movement were all inspirational and indefatigable preachers. Martin Luther combined his duties as a professor at Wittenberg University with a position as minister of the (only) parish church in Wittenberg; his skills as a preacher were honed years before he fell out with the Pope. During a long career he preached more than six thousand sermons.
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John Calvin, the reformer of Geneva, would preach three times a week: cerebral, forensic biblical sermons, unstinting in their denunciation of vice. So celebrated was his mastery of the art of preaching that travellers made a point of stopping off at Geneva to hear him.
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Determined that nothing should be lost, disciples paid for each sermon to be transcribed for posterity. Calvin disapproved – he made a clear distinction between his academic lectures and these extempore performances – but it is largely thanks to these transcriptions that we can hear the authentic voice of the master, without the mediation of print. Calvin did not spare his audience. Frequently he would turn from the word of Scripture to the discontents of the present day: those reluctant to abandon familiar religious practice, those guilty of sharp dealing in their business.
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Members of the congregation often left feeling bruised and put upon; a resentment compounded when they had to endure the taunts of those who had enjoyed Calvin's well-aimed shafts landing elsewhere. Several times this led to scuffles outside the church door, an unseemly end to worship that the magistrates had to resolve.
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This was raw politics, and the Church was not above using sermons for purely political purposes. In 1546 Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation but to Catholics a notorious apostate, lay dying. For Catholics this was an eagerly awaited moment of truth: would the Devil come and claim him? So it was vitally important for the Reformation that Luther died well, peacefully. His principal lieutenants crowded around the bedside to witness his passing, and when he had slipped away without incident they publicised the dignified manner of his death in widely circulated sermons.
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As the Protestant movement became entrenched, the burden of religious instruction was shared by many thousands of preaching ministers. This was a heavy responsibility, and many did not fulfil it. Faced with a dull or incompetent preacher, religious enthusiasts went to other churches to hear more accomplished practitioners. Those who remained sometimes struggled to stay awake. Preachers often claimed that their congregations were disrespectfully inattentive, but this was not always the case. When in a sermon the English minister Nicholas Day made what seemed like an astonishingly indiscreet denunciation of the English expedition to La Rochelle in 1627, he was reported by three members of his congregation; one of whom, as it turned out, had taken detailed notes.
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The accused minister talked himself out of this indiscretion, but the incident demonstrates vividly the power of the pulpit to shape and disturb local opinion. This was partly because local pastors were more likely to stray into the delicate territory of domestic politics than were the published news media. In this particular regard published sermons are a poor guide to what was said, since they were often stripped back to their theological essentials, with the potentially contentious topical references removed.
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This can tend to disguise their potency as a mode of topical debate. But the state authorities were not deceived. Not only did they keep a close ear out for what was said; they also took care to sponsor sermons that promoted the official line on the issues of the day. In England sermons at court and at Paul's Cross in the City of London were both occasions for the explanation of official policy, and the opportunity for the young and ambitious to make themselves known.
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Indeed, some serious sermon-goers disapproved of the preaching at Paul's Cross, on the grounds that those who attended were attracted more by the hope of news and novelty than by serious theological intent.
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Political sermons by prominent preachers were an important arm of policy. In Italy Francesco Visdomini preached two widely circulated sermons, one to celebrate England's reconciliation with Rome in 1555 under Mary Tudor, the other almost four years later to reflect the sobering consequences of her death in 1558.
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These examples help place the sermon in the range of oral media discussed in this chapter. Unlike market gossip and tavern talk, sermons were unlikely to be a primary conduit of news. Few of those ranged in the pews would have been receiving their first intimation of events as they listened to a sermon. Where the sermon could play a crucial role was in shaping interpretation. This was all the more potent in an age when tidings good and bad were interpreted within a theological framework. Ministers could help their parishioners understand changes of government and worship practice, declarations of war and peace, natural disaster and human catastrophe. Preaching could help regulate a
society easily disturbed by rumour and ill-tidings. The role of preaching as medicine for troubled souls was all the more effective because the sermon shared several critical characteristics with the other principal forms of oral news dissemination. Like the swirling, disorderly market gossip it sought to regulate, effective preaching appealed to the emotions as well as the intellect. The best preachers were passionate and engaged as well as learned. The primacy of preaching in the service of worship also represented an acknowledgement that learning was a communal process – here led not by drink-fuelled rumour but by an informed and respected leader of the local community. It was for these reasons that many exponents of preaching argued that the private reading of the Scriptures was no alternative to hearing sermons, an interesting shift from Luther's initial uncompromising emphasis on the primacy of Scripture.
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It also seems to be the case – and this is something that we will observe later about the market for newspapers – that people did not necessarily need to understand everything they heard (in the case of newspapers, read) to appreciate its worth.
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Those who sat through many hours of abstruse, repetitive, and no doubt often poorly delivered sermons seem nevertheless to have valued the experience. It was, at the very least, a sign that the Church took the salvation of their souls very seriously.

By bringing the sermon into the regular round of the weekly service, Protestantism had created a powerful new mechanism of communication – but also a potential new focus for dissent. This was why the new religious regimes devoted so much attention to the regulation of the clergy, and why the clergy collectively exercised such power. The result was an emerging and widely acknowledged convergence of interest. The state required from the clergy obedience and support for government policy. In return the state supported clerical efforts to create a godly people and maintain a well-regulated Sabbath. Thus while ministers were regaling their congregations on a Sunday, many European cities employed officers charged with patrolling the streets, ensuring that shops or taverns did no business; and absentees from church were not permitted to engage in sports or other disapproved distractions.
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On Sunday ministers were to have the monopoly of public communication. But they were perfectly aware that this was but a brief respite from the cacophony of the working week, when gossip, singing and the mundane networks of everyday communication would reign supreme. This, they knew, they were powerless to control.

CHAPTER 7

Triumph and Tragedy

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19 October 1571 a single ship eased cautiously into the harbour at Venice. Earlier in the autumn a combined Christian fleet had sailed eastward to confront the galleys of the Ottoman Empire. Nothing had been heard since. Those who now saw the
Angelo Gabriele
were at first appalled. The men on board appeared to be wearing Turkish garb, so the Venetians feared the worst. It was only when they realised these were clothes captured from the defeated Turkish fleet that they began to feel hope. The ship's captain then stepped ashore and confirmed the glad tidings: the Christian fleet had won a crushing victory. As the bells rang out, men ran through the streets shouting, ‘Victory, victory.’ The crew were escorted in triumph to St Mark's Cathedral to give thanks.
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Thus Christian Europe heard the first news of the battle of Lepanto. It was an extraordinary feat of arms; even on a continent now bitterly divided between competing faiths, the victory was greeted with universal acclamation. The news of the battle spread swiftly throughout Europe: celebration was sustained and heartfelt.

The battle of Lepanto was the first of several major news events which, for different reasons, engaged the attention of the whole of Europe. The intricate network of communication that had been building since the onset of print had reached its first stage of maturity: the aftermath of Lepanto is remarkable both for the speed with which the news was passed around the continent and the sophistication of the media reaction. The same may be said of two other seminal moments from this troubled and turbulent era. Whereas the victory of Lepanto was greeted with near universal rejoicing, news of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre reignited the full bitterness of the conflict between Europe's divided confessions. The defeat of the Spanish Armada over a decade later, in 1588, was the tense and drawn-out denouement of these fundamental religious
and political conflicts. These were three very different events in terms of news. The battle of Lepanto provided a rare moment of optimism in the prolonged and anxious period of warfare between the forces of Christianity and their perpetual foe, the Ottoman Empire. This was news anxiously awaited. In contrast the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre came as a thunderbolt that transfixed and divided European opinion. The climax of this new era of religious bitterness and hatred was experienced in the shape of the Spanish Armada, an agonisingly slow burner played out in maritime conditions particularly challenging for news reporting.