Giving the Public Due Notice in Song China and Renaissance Rome

Abstract

This chapter explores the similarities and differences in methods of conveying information to common people in two societies where printing was coming into greater use — the huge agrarian empire of Song China (tenth to thirteen centuries) and the city of Renaissance Rome (fourteenth to fifteenth centuries). The Song material is strongest on the bureaucratic reasons for posting notices and the language used in them. Authors preserved hundreds of notices, probably seeing in them proof of their serious commitment to promoting the welfare of the people under them. The sources for notice-posting in Renaissance Rome are fuller on the practices associated with circulating notices throughout the city on church doors both by the papacy and by its critics, who sometimes posted satirical or contemptuous notices at the same sites. The posting of notices in Renaissance Rome was a bureaucratic practice that had strong ritualistic overtones, was often highly politicized, and therefore could easily be subverted by critics of the regime.