Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe

The essays in this collection demonstrate how Fama and her sisters, gossip and rumour, were central in private and public discourses about state and society in early modern Europe. In an era when oral, scribal, visual, and print cultures competed to satisfy a growing public demand for ‘news’, gossip and rumour informed people about the actions and morals of their social and political elites, and they commonly enabled people who did not usually participate in politics to engage with the public discourses about religion, governance, and society which shaped their lives and the state. So while gossip and rumour might be scurrilous and entertaining, they nonetheless performed a vital political function, regulating communal and political behaviour in the upper social echelons, as well as in neighbourhoods lower down the social scale where they might constitute a form of popular justice. This timely interdisciplinary study explores how gossip and rumour functioned dualistically at all levels of the early modern state and society either to advance or to defame reputations, and thereby shape public opinion.