News Before Newspapers: Hobbes, Venice, and the Public Sphere.

Filippo De Vivo (University of Oxford, Berkeley Chair of Italian Culture, 2025/26) in conversation with Paula Findlen (Stanford University), Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley) and Mairi McLaughlin (UC Berkeley),

This paper argues that Thomas Hobbes’s engagement with the correspondence between his patron, William Cavendish, and the Venetian Servite friar Fulgenzio Micanzio in 1615–28, exposed him to fundamental questions about the politics of information. The letters reported on war, diplomacy, and religious affairs during the Thirty Years’ War, blending political intelligence with highly partisan reflections to foster opposition against James I’s pro-Spanish foreign policy. For this reason, Hobbes translated them into English and prepared them for circulation at a crucial turning point in 1624 as part of the active intervention of Cavendish’s circle’s in contemporary debates. Micanzio discussed the political force of news—its capacity to inform, persuade, and unsettle – but his letters also confronted Hobbes with a dilemma. On the one hand, circulating information was part and parcel of political activity; on the other, it risked fuelling an already incendiary political climate. This experience sharpened his concern with rhetoric, sedition, and the management of opinion in an age marked by an increasingly aggressive public sphere. As Hobbes came to see, this problem extended beyond the correspondence itself to the very conditions of politics in an age of expanding communication and rising absolutism.

Filippo de Vivo is Professor of Early Modern History at Oxford. A specialist of Renaissance and early modern Italy, he has written about power and communication in Venice, from rhetoric in government councils to printed pamphlets, rumours and graffiti, on the history of Italian archives, and on the history of walking. His publications include Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (2007) and, most recently, a comparative study of Istanbul and Venice for The Routledge Handbook of Information History (2026). He is completing an edition of Thomas Hobbes’s translation of the letters of Fulgenzio Micanzio (1615-28) for the Clarendon complete works of Hobbes.