Staging Time and Rivalry: News Prints on Charles V's Roman Triumph in the Low Countries
In April 1536, Charles V entered Rome in triumph, and the weeks that followed brought sharp political and diplomatic confrontation. This lecture looks less at what happened than at how it was told. Far from Rome, in the former Low Countries, printed news pamphlets relayed these events to numerous readers. Rather than interpreting these texts as neutral reports, we will treat them as instruments of political action: by selecting, ordering and framing events, they helped build a political discourse for a distant audience.
Two threads run through the talk. The first is rivalry. The prints set the emperor against Francis I and the pope at a moment when war was imminent, shaping how readers understood the conflict to come. The second is time. Both the emperor's actions in Rome and the prints that reported them made time a political actor in its own right, through ceremonial rhythm, the pace of news, and the gap between event and reading. Following this thread invites us to reconsider how news travelled across the Empire, and what it can tell us about its cultural connections.