The Wages of War: Battles, Prints and Entrepreneurs in Late Seventeenth-Century Venice: Battles, prints and entrepreneurs in late seventeenth-century venice

Not everyone in the early eighteenth century profited equally from learning about current events — at least according to the English observer Joseph Addison. Deploring the spectacle of civilized English lips awkwardly bending around the angular syllables in such foreign-sounding names as Knin, Chilefa, Dragoneste, Gomenizza and Ingolstadt, he noted, ‘I believe it is of more importance to an Englishman to know the history of his ancestors than that of his contemporaries who live upon the banks of the Danube or the Borysthenes’. And in a famous issue of The Tatler he recounted the story of an unfortunate upholstery maker in his neighborhood who ‘has wife and children, but was much more inquisitive to know what passed in Poland than in his own family, and was in greater pain and anxiety of mind for King Augustus's welfare than for that of his nearest relations. I asked him, whether he had yet married off his eldest daughter? He told me, No; but pray, what are your thoughts about the King of Sweden? For though his wife and children were starving, I found his chief concern at present was for this great monarch.