The merchant as global reporter
Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique, the Great Tew Circle. Wren more than once returns to Microcosmography’s comparison of the nave of St Paul’s, where London’s freshest newsletters were to be procured, with the commercial buzz of the Royal Exchange, with news replacing goods and hard cash as a potentially fruitful alternative currency. Wren is a recovering academic, expert in the
