A legyőzhetetlenség listája

Abstract

Owing to the propaganda campaign which accompanied the actual military campaign of the Invincible Armada against England in 1588 and which was employed very consciously by both belligerent parties, a huge amount of sources has come down to us representing a wide variety of genres from ballads to spy letters and from paintings to coins. The topic of the paper is the analysis of a single news pamphlet containing a detailed list regarding the size and the equipment of the fleet as well as the names of the most important participants. These data were gathered and recorded at the muster of the Spanish Armada held in Lisbon in May 1588, and consequently quickly published and distributed throughout Europe. The paper examines both the content and the form of the pamphlet. What was the point of publishing and distributing such a rather dull text full of numbers and data? What kind of readership might it have been interesting to and what could they learn from it? And finally, what was the significance and function of using the form of the list?