“He tells us that”
Strategies of reporting adversarial news in the English Civil War
In this paper, I examine a form of argumentation employed by one of the most prominent parliamentarian news pamphlets of the English Civil War (1642–1649). The pamphlet in question is Mercurius Britanicus. It was founded to counter through its pages the news that was being published in Mercurius Aulicus, the foremost royalist publication. In its animadversion of Aulicus’s news, Britanicus first repeated the royalist text, and then responded to it. In my study, I shall focus on instances where the not wholly faithful reporting of Aulicus’s text leads to (socio)pragmatic meanings. I have taken into consideration both the wider social context in which the pamphlet writers were writing as well as the immediate situational context – the pamphlet as a genre. In my analysis of Britanicus’s animadversion, I examine titles of courtesy and the omission and substitution of words.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data
- 3.
Britanicus’s reporting strategies
- 3.1Titles of courtesy
- 3.2Omission and substitution of words
- 4.Conclusions
- Notes
-
Primary sources
-
References
References (37)
Primary sources
Early English Books Online (EEBO). Accessed August 2014 at: [URL].
Florence Early English Newspapers (FEEN). Accessed August 2014 at: [URL].
Mercurius Aulicus
(1643–1645).
Mercurius Britanicus
(1643–1646).
References
Brownlees, Nicholas. 2006. “Polemic and Propaganda in Civil War News Discourse.” In Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), News Discourse in Early Modern Britain, 17–40. Bern: Peter Lang.
Brownlees, Nicholas. 2012. “The Beginnings of Periodical News (1620–1665).” In Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees, Birte Bös and Udo Fries (eds), News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis, 5–48. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Brownlees, Nicholas. 2014 [2011]. The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth-Century England. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Claridge, Claudia. 2010. “News Discourse.” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 587–620. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2010. “Historical Sociopragmatics.” In Andreas H. Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 64–94. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
van Dijk, Teun A. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Arnold.
Frank, Joseph. 1961. The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 

Fritz, Gerd. 2003. “Dialogical Structures in 17th Century Controversies.” In Marina Bondi and Sorin Stati (eds), Dialogue Analysis 2000, 199–208. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. 

Fritz, Gerd. 2010. “Controversies.” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 451–81. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
McElligott, Jason. 2007. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.
Mazzon, Gabriella. 2010. “Terms of Address.” In Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics, 351–76. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Nevitt, Marcus. 2006. Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Palander-Collin, Minna and Minna Nevala. 2006. “Reporting in Eighteenth-century Letters of Hester Pozzi.” In Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl (eds), Syntax, Style and Grammatical Norms: English from 1500–2000, 123–41. Bern: Peter Lang.
Peacey, Jason. 2004. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Peacey, Jason. 2011. “Pamphlets”. In Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, 453–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Purkiss, Diane. 2006. The English Civil War: A People’s History. New York: Basic Books.
Raymond, Joad. 1996. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649. Oxford: Clarendon.
Raymond, Joad. 2003. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raymond, Joad. 2008. “Marchamont Nedham”. In David Cannadine (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed August 2014 at: [URL].
Royle, Trevor. 2004. Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. London: Abacus.
Russell, Conrad. 1990. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon.
Tannen, Deborah. 2007 [1989]. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
van de Poppe, Cora & Joanna Wall
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.