If the mobility turn in history is beginning to provide a new understanding of movement, interaction, and encounter in the past, the history of information and networks of communication are a central topic to re-assess. Handwritten newsletters (avvisi in Italian, geschriebene Zeitungen in German, cartas de aviso in Spanish, nouvelles à la main in French), namely manuscript sheets containing fresh news that kept Europeans up to date about current events from the mid-sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, help us to reflect on the implications of a mobilities turn in history from both a material and an epistemological perspective. Historians have studied the movement of people, goods, and news through centres – courts, cities, postal hubs – and also peripheries. They have shown how news travelling along these networks kept members of the network informed, and how these same individuals in turn spread the news more widely and influenced or even ‘disturbed’ other national or ethnic communities, though without actually modifying them. In this traditional view, although individuals, goods, and information entered into movement and came into contact, nonetheless fixity or ‘sedentarism’ constituted a kind of natural condition. It is a conception that, as Caren Kaplan writes, “rests on forms of territorial nationalism and their associated technologies of mapping and visualisation which emerged out of the Enlightenment cosmic view of the world.”