The authors of notices and chroniclers in Madrid of the 17th century

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to make a brief approach to what I considerer a sample of Spanish «protoperiodismo»: chroniclers and authors of notices in seventeenth-century in Madrid. Of course it is clear, and I will insist on that throughout this work, that I do not intend to make a comparison between journalism, a phenomenon clearly related to frequency and contemporaneity, and these chronicles which are almost pieces of an archaeological crawl. The term «protoperiodismo» colud be also considered exaggerated, but it was difficult to find a word for such samples, it would be also pretentious to talk about «preperiodismo» (although it is the one proposed in Seoane and Sáiz, 2007), perhaps it would be more suitable to use the term used by Fuentes Aragoneses: «paleoperiodismo», or «pre-journalism», a term used by the same author (Funetes, 1998, 13, 14). Turning to the analysis, it has been focused on those aspects in which the canny, andinterested eyes ofour writers fell. Th ese aspects will presumably to give protagonism to the city of Madrid. Two issues will be discussed in this paper: Firstly the characterization of this «arqueoperiodismo», and secondly, the analysis of the things they saw, but also of
the questions they omitted, working with this description to the confi guration of a local Madrid stereotype, and even (as I will try to demonstrate) national «cliché».