How did Europe's oldest political institution come to grips with
the disruptive new technology of print? Printing thrived after it
came to Rome in the 1460s. Renaissance scholars, poets, and
pilgrims in the Eternal City formed a ready market for
mass-produced books. But Rome was also a capital city-seat of the
Renaissance papacy, home to its bureaucracy, and a hub of
international diplomacy-and print played a role in these circles,
too. In Papal Bull, Margaret Meserve uncovers a critical new
dimension of the history of early Italian printing by revealing how
the Renaissance popes wielded print as a political tool. Over half
a century of war and controversy-from approximately 1470 to
1520-the papacy and its agents deployed printed texts to potent
effect, excommunicating enemies, pursuing diplomatic alliances,
condemning heretics, publishing indulgences, promoting new
traditions, and luring pilgrims and their money to the papal city.
Early modern historians have long stressed the innovative press
campaigns of the Protestant Reformers, but Meserve shows that the
popes were even earlier adopters of the new technology, deploying
mass communication many decades before Luther. The papacy astutely
exploited the new medium to broadcast ancient claims to authority
and underscore the centrality of Rome to Catholic Christendom.
Drawing on a vast archive, Papal Bull reveals how the Renaissance
popes used print to project an authoritarian vision of their
institution and their capital city, even as critics launched
blistering attacks in print that foreshadowed the media wars of the
coming Reformation. Papal publishing campaigns tested longstanding
principles of canon law promulgation, developed new visual and
graphic vocabularies, and prompted some of Europe's first printed
pamphlet wars. An exciting interdisciplinary study based on new
literary, historical, and bibliographical evidence, this book will
appeal to students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the history of the book.
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