The title of Reeves’ book compactly captures the scope of its ambitions; the subtitle pinpoints a problem of execution. Evening News concerns two modes of information newly disseminated and widely discussed in early Modern Europe—(1) revelations about the night sky, discovered via the telescope’s new optics, published most pivotally in Galileo’s evocatively named Siderius Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) in 1610; and (2) the copious new terrestrial journalism (newsletters, corantos, and gazettes) that was becoming a pan-European phenomenon, focused on the advent and the waging of the Thirty Years’ War. But the and in Reeve’s subtitle cues a question common to all interdisciplinary studies: How can we, and how should we, link such disparate phenomena and fields? This book is not sure.
Reeves’ main method is analogy, buttressed by close reading. Writers ranging from Johannes Kepler to Ben Jonson, Reeves shows, drew provocative parallels between astronomy and journalism, because both enterprises...