Meserve, Margaret. Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome

Any review of Margaret Meserve's book will be published, printed, circulated, and finally (hopefully) read by a receptive audience.Just like the materials studied in Meserve's Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome, a review is a tool, one that advertises both its subject and its contribution to a wider world.However, unlike academic reviews, papal bulls had real power in early modern culture.Meserve's book is a remarkable example of how to study the papacy's preferred media of the bull, especially through the lenses of book history and political communication.She revises the study of early modern print culture and the early modern papacy, demonstrating how to think about documents with an eye to their circulation.Papal Bull argues that in the decades prior to the Lutheran Reformation, the papacy deliberately exploited the new technology of print.Meserve suggests, counter to much historiography, that the popes effectively used the new printing presses to reinforce ancient and medieval narratives of power in the worlds of early modern politics and religion.This was no easy feat.Rather than expecting literati to argue amongst themselves for the papacy's importance, the curia and its allies across Europe used the new technology to replicate, reinforce, re-create, and occasionally outright create new texts to bolster their perceived ancient authority.The papacy did this primarily through the bull, a public decree or law issued by the pope, and "Rome's most formal but also most common medium of political communication" (9).Pairing many papal bulls with other sources, Meserve shows how the popes "used print to cement their own grip on power, to stifle dissent, and to prosecute their foes" (15).The book proceeds largely chronologically, from the advent of print in Rome in 1467 to the publication of Luther's excommunication bull in 1520.The first half of the book addresses the political contexts of the papacy's use of print, while the second reveals how popes used print to define and shape their authority.The first chapter grounds print in its cultural context.Meserve describes what political communication was like in pre-print Rome, how bulls were circulated, who had authority in what spaces, and how the public responded to

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