Meserve, Margaret: Papal Bull. Print, Politics and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2021.
From the 1450s onward, the new technology of printing spread through late medieval Europe and brought about significant changes in media culture. Among the first productions of the printing presses were publications related to the military conflicts in which the papacy was involved. Despite this fact, the traditional narrative of printing history is mainly focused on the pope’s opponents, namely the Protestant reformers, as the supposed heralds of the early modern period. The monograph at hand, written by the eminent scholar of Humanist literature on the Crusades, Margaret Meserve, aims to provide a more nuanced picture. The focus of her analysis are the ways in which papal political agents in the city of Rome between 1470 and 1520 used the printing press to serve their political and religious ambitions.
The book is divided into 10 chapters. In the introduction (pp. 1—20) the author delineates the scope of her project and her methodological approach. During the late 15th century, the Holy See was almost constantly involved in warfare, both against the Ottoman Empire, which represented a major threat to Western Christendom at the time, and against increasingly independent territorial states and urban communities.
Meserve provides an extensive survey of the printed papal bulls that were issued in the context of these conflicts – source material that has not been dealt with in great detail by previous scholarship. Methodologically, she connects the political history of late medieval papal warfare with the perspective of historical book studies. The following seven chapters (pp. 21—346) implement this research agenda in great empirical detail. It would be impossible to provide a detailed summary of Meserve’s rich findings. The main thrust of her argument is a nuanced picture of the role of the printing press for changes within the sphere of public communication: She stresses that the new medium itself could not initiate a modernization of the ecclesiastical institutions that mainly used it for disseminating very traditional religious and political messages. Thus, she opposes the teleological view that printing was intrinsically connected to revolutionary social transformations like the Protestant reformations. She also provides ample evidence against the view that early printing led to an immediate standardization of visual images; on the contrary, the new technology gave artists more possibilities for variation.
The study provides substantial knowledge on a neglected archive of late medieval incunabula that will stimulate new research questions for years to come. This part of the monograph also contains reproductions of many of the printed texts and images discussed, which makes it easy to follow the author’s arguments. A short conclusion (pp. 347–351) sums up her central argument, namely, that even decades before Luther and the reformation, the papacy was already involved in media campaigns that made ample use of printing.
Overall, this is a very thorough and carefully researched analysis that sheds new light on a wide range of aspects of late medieval political communication. Indeed, Meserve’s monograph raises more questions than she herself is able to answer within her volume. Her book is a pioneering achievement, and the principal merit lies in paving the way for further researchers to follow up on the topics and questions introduced here. The impressive amount of printed rhetorical pieces promoting the crusade against other Christian communities, such as the pamphlet against the city of Bâle by Pope Sixtus IV (pp. 128—159), will doubtlessly spark the interest of historians and other scholars who are dealing with late medieval cultures of war and military history. At the same time, the material of the book is presented in a very accessible way.