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Citation: A. Castillo Gómez. 
Words on Walls: An Approach 
to Exposed Writing in Early 
Modern Europe (2020). Jems 
9: pp. 57-82. doi: http://dx.doi.
org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-
11190

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JEMS - Journal of

Early Modern Studies

Words on Walls 
An Approach to Exposed Writing  

in Early Modern Europe 

Antonio Castillo Gómez
University of Alcalá (<antonio.castillo@uah.es>)

Abstract

The article outlines an approach to different modalities of exposed writing 
in early modern Europe, following a discussion on the concept. Domestic, 
closed and public spaces are considered, in order to understand the multiple 
meanings – political, informational, devotional, promotional, testimonial 
and even as mere pastime, as is the case of many graffiti – of exposed writing. 
This approach always looks into the places where the writings were displayed, 
their supports (parchment, paper, cloth, stone, wall), the different ways in 
which they were made (written and painted by hand, printed, incised or 
chiselled) as well as the conditions of exposure, since all these aspects have 
an explicit impact on the function pursued by each writing fixed or written 
on a wall. There are clear differences between monumental inscriptions, 
commercial advertisements, libels and graffiti. Likewise, their placement in 
a street where everyone could see them or in a church, a prison or a domestic 
space entailed different functions. Depending on the place of exposure and 
the type of writing, they were used to question their contemporary society 
in one way or another; the questions that arise today, when we study the 
presence of these types of writing during that period, are just as manifold.

Keywords: Domestic Space, Early Modern Europe, Exposed Writing, Meanings 
of Writing, Public Space

Words on walls are words imposed by 
someone’s will, whether that person is 
high up or low down, words imposed 
on the gaze of all the others who have no 
choice but to see them or receive them.  
                 Italo Calvino

1. Introduction

If we aim to propose a general approach to exposed writing in 
early modern Europe, we must begin by establishing the scope 
of that term. Our starting point has undoubtedly to be the 
definition given by Armando Petrucci in La scrittura. Ideologia 



antonio castillo gómez58

e rappresentazione (1986). In its preface, Petrucci also proposed a series of concepts – the 
social function of writing, the social use of writing, monumental writing, graphic space and 
writing space, domain of graphic space and programme of graphic exhibition – which are 
key to understanding the analysed written production. It is a production that appeals to 
the visibility and readability of the text both from the procedures of its manufacture (i.e. its 
materiality) and from the places where the text is exposed. In this context, exposed writing 
can be understood as ‘any type of writing designed to be used in open or closed spaces, which 
allows a plural (in-group, massive) reading, from a distance, of a text written on an exposed 
surface’. As a result, a ‘necessary condition for its use to be effective is that exposed writing 
needs to be sufficiently large, and to present the message it carries in an evident and clear 
(verbal and/or visual) way’ (Petrucci 1986, xx).1

Although the Italian palaeographer focussed his study mainly on monumental 
inscriptions, he also included other less solemn products, such as the defamatory posters of 
the modern age or the graffiti of different times, but especially of the last third of the twentieth 
century. Along with monumental writings, graffiti represent one of the most ancient types 
of exposed writing. However, they introduce some nuances in the conditions attributed to 
exposed writing, since the execution of graffiti did not always take into account whether size 
and location would make the messages evident and clear.

Further expanding this graphic universe, I will also consider in this essay any written 
manifestation – permanent or ephemeral – conceived to convey a message from an exposed 
surface. This nuance expressly affects all types of broadsheets or single-sheets used for the 
transmission of mandates and official regulations, proclamation of festivities, announcement of 
academic dissertations or commercial advertising. Many of these configured the cheap prints 
that constituted the main activity of plenty of printing shops, particularly from the second half 
of the sixteenth century. Yet, limiting the study to typographic formats, as usually happens 
since they are easier to trace, means to fragment the written culture of a given moment. This 
is especially so when the functions performed by the different materials do not depend on 
whether they were handwritten or printed.2

Under this global approach – rooted in the Petruccian concept of the history of 
written culture (Petrucci 2002, v-vi) – I propose a journey to the world of exposed 
writing in the early modern age. Undoubtedly, such a wide endeavour involves certain 
risks, both chronologically (since it covers a couple of centuries) and geographically (since 
only part of Western Europe is included). However, this essay, also limited in size, does 
not aim to focus on the specific aspects of each cultural, political or religious context, 
but on the common elements that emerge in the uses and meanings of exposed writings. 

1 There is an English version of this work by Petrucci (1993), but it does not include the preface to the original 
Italian edition, where this and the aforementioned terms are defined. This article is the result of the research project 
‘Scripta in itinere’: Discourses, Forms and Appropriations of Written Culture in Public Spaces from the Early Modern Era 
to the Present (HAR2014-51883-P), funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the National Research 
Agency of Spain. Here and elsewhere in this essay, translations of works not available in English are by Enrique 
Iñiguez Rodríguez, who translated this article from the Spanish original.

2 I make this clarification because typographic fetishism sometimes leads to forgetting similar products copied 
by hand, as in Pettegree 2017.



words on walls 59

Therefore, I prefer to deal with its communicative function in the broad sense, taking 
into account the plurality of its manifestations and the interaction between the messages 
and the places where exposed writing was registered and made visible, while considering 
specifically the urban space, which was the main scenario of said written activities. 
As we shall see, walls hosted a wide spectrum of written communication, where the word 
was imposed, inevitably in many cases, as Italo Calvino puts it in the quotation at the head 
of this essay. In other cases, however, the strength of this communication did not fall in the 
public presence, but in what the messages indicate about the intended motivations of those 
who wrote or painted on a specific wall or similar surface. Lastly, since the execution of 
certain kinds of exposed writings could lead to transgression due to the occupation of spaces 
not conceived for that purpose or to the dissemination of messages that were incompatible 
with the prevailing ideology in each territory, it seemed appropriate to close this article with 
a discussion of this subject.

2. Between Private and Public: Home, Church and School

The location par excellence of exposed writing is the public space, but this does not mean 
that writings were not executed as well in the domestic sphere under different materialities 
and temporalities. Devotional woodcuts, whose origin dates back to fourteenth-century 
Germany and, a bit later, Italy, were massively disseminated and one of the spaces in which 
they were used was the homes of medium and upper social groups, especially thanks to the 
multiplying effect introduced by the printing press. Those images of Christ, the Virgin and 
the saints, on planks and in particular as prints, often with their corresponding legends and 
prayers, were placed in canopies, pantries and hangings on the walls as a form of family 
devotion (Nalle 2008; González Sánchez 2017, 77-79) and as a means of educating children 
(Niccoli 2011, 22-42). Their presence was also a way to implore the mediation of the saints, 
thus fulfilling magico-religious functions comparable to those that have been observed of the 
so-called nóminas (cloth bags hung on the neck with written papers or images inside), cartas 
de tocar and other iconographic and textual amulets (Marquilhas 1999; Pérez García 2002).3 
Next to the images hung on the walls there could be a forecast, calendar or almanac with 
very varied information: astronomical and meteorological data, health recipes, agricultural 
advice, relevant events, festivities, etc. (figure 1);4 i.e., a series of practical recommendations, 
some of them expressly useful for those who lived in rural areas or had agricultural properties. 
However, the product is much more complex and, whether in the hanging version or a small-
format printed edition, it was also used in certain circumstances to comment on events and 
disseminate political content (Curto Ramada 2015, 186-191).5

3 For a discussion on the magico-religious uses of writing, with a broad perspective, see Poulin 1979 and 
Cardona 1987, 154-193.

4 For more information on the collection of almanacs of the Archivo Municipal of Toledo, centred mainly on 
the ways of indication of time, see Galende Díaz 2011.

5 Since these can be found in greater amounts for the eighteenth century and later, a part of the bibliography 
has focussed on this period. Capp 1979, Salman 1999 and some authors of the collective volume Lüsebrink et al. 
2003 have dealt with their dissemination in the previous period. For the case of Spain, see Moll 1996.



antonio castillo gómez60

Figure 1 – Almanaque o calendario deste año del Señor de 1681 (1680), Madrid, Julián de Paredes.  
Courtesy of Archivo Municipal de Toledo

In some dwellings, the protection invoked by religious images was materialised more permanently 
through maxims incised or painted on the walls of the rooms. As noted by Juliet Fleming, 
William Phiston’s compilation Welspring of wittie conceites (1584) proposed in its final part 
‘certaine worthie sentences, very meete to be written about a Bedchamber or, to be set up in any 
conuenient place in a house’ (2001, 95). Contemporaneously the appendices of Thomas Tusser’s 
A hundreth good pointes of husbandry, lately maried vnto a hundreth good poynts of huswifery (1570) 
included a series of ‘husbandry poesies’ for the different rooms of the house (hall, parlour, guest’s 
chamber, bed chamber). Among others, in the form of a question and its answer, the following 
‘wise sentence’ was recommended for the bedroom wall: ‘What worse dispaire, than loth to 
die, for feare to go to Hell? What greater faith than trust in god, through Christ in heuen to 
dwel’ (1570, fol. 40v). Inscriptions in Arabic with the texts ‘Al-Mulk-lillāh’ (‘The kingdom is 
God’s’) and ‘Al-Shukr-lillāh’ (‘Thanks be to God’), found in several rooms on the ground floor 
of a medieval manor house in Sigüenza (Guadalajara, Spain), built in the fifteenth century on 
a previous dwelling (Lavado Paradinas 2006), show the roots of these devotional decorations in 
different cultures.6 A similar function can be determined for the inscriptions with sacred names 
carved on the lintels of the doors or the symbols of the cross, widely disseminated in rural areas 
(Cruz Sánchez 2010). In this regard, the presence of cruciform signs in the form of graffiti 
in the Morisco houses that survived in Spain in the sixteenth century has been interpreted 
as a way to purify them against the Islamic content of other motifs, such as six- and eight-

6 In the Islamic world the use of writing with decorative characters was widely disseminated on account of the 
prohibition of representing the human figure.



words on walls 61

pointed stars, six-petal rosettes or inscriptions in Arabic (Barrera Maturana 2008).7 Thus, 
the inscription of religious symbols and maxims on visible surfaces was a way of sanctifying 
the houses practised by different cultures, which remained in force during the early modern 
age and even later.

Transcending into public space, and surely as a form of popular catechism linked to the 
effects of the Catholic Reformation, the biblical sentence ‘En la casa del que jura, no faltará 
desventura’ (‘The house of a man that useth much swearing shall be filled with misfortune’, 
rephrasing Sirach 23:11) – an exhortation against blasphemy and unnecessary swearing referring 
in turn to a paraphrase of the book of Zechariah (5:3-4) – was recorded or painted between 
1549 and 1682 on the outside of many churches and civil buildings, mainly town halls, in 
the Spanish provinces of Álava, Burgos, Cuenca, Guadalajara, La Rioja, Navarra, Biscay and 
Zaragoza (González Blanco and Calatayud Fernández 1996, 2001 and 2004). Aiming at the 
moral edification of the nuns, the Ceremonial povr l’vsage des religievses carmelites deschaussées 
(1659), by Father Giovanni Agostino Gallicio, general of the congregation of Clerks Regular of 
Saint Paul, or Barnabas, included a chapter – book XVI, chapter xv – on the sentences that were 
to be written in different places of the convent of Saint-Denis, founded in 1625 and converted 
today into the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. However, this phenomenon occurred likewise in other 
convents in France, Belgium and Luxembourg (Rollin 1986, 46). Although the writings that 
have been preserved date back to a plan executed in 1869, the historical record was immortalised 
earlier in the painting L’infirmerie du carmel, by Guillot, an eighteenth-century French painter. 
They were mainly quotes from the Old and New Testament, followed by writings of saints, and 
among these some from the founder of Carmel, Saint Teresa of Jesus. As the ceremonial text 
says, the purpose of the writings was to help people ‘raise their soul to God’:

Un des foins que doiuent ceux á qui Dieu commet le governement des maisons religieuses, c’est de les 
remplir d’objets qui puissent aider les personnes qui y demeurent, á enlever leur ames à Dieu. C’est 
pour cet effet que cet ordre a en usage d’avoir des sentences tirées de l’Écriture Sainte et des oeuvres 
de divers saints en quelques endroits du monastere, savoir au Chapitre, au Novitiat, au Refectoir, au 
Chaufoir et au Parloir. Ces sentences sont escrites autour des murailles et enfermés dans de cartouches. 
Et comme ces sentences doiuent être appropriées à chaque lieu on a jugé à propos de les inserer ici et 
d’en faire un Chapitre. (Gallicio 1659, 427)8

These edifying uses of certain types of exposed writing are rooted in a long tradition exemplified by 
the inscriptions, mosaics and phylacteries traced everywhere in worship places of different faiths. 
From this perspective, the recovery of writing with political and civil functions in open spaces 
that took place between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, comprehensively studied in Italy 

7 Other graffiti found in a house of medieval origin in the port city of Toulon, France, dating from the second 
half of the sixteenth century to the first quarter of the seventeenth century, reveal an Arab-Islamic influence. This 
constitutes an atypical set of Islamic anthropomorphic figures, animal and plant motifs, naval representations and 
some inscriptions in Arabic, and they could prove the existence of relations between members of the Christian and 
Islamic communities – particularly commercial relations – despite the evident differences and cultural and religious 
barriers of those times (Molina et al. 2015, 181).

8 ‘One of the tasks of those to whom God commits the government of religious houses is to fill them with 
objects that may help the people who live there to raise their souls to God. It is for this purpose that this Order 
is in the habit of having sentences from the Holy Scriptures and the works of various saints in some places of the 
monastery, namely the Chapter house, the Novitiate, the Refectory, the Calefactory, and the Parlour. These sentences 
are written around the walls and enclosed in cartouches. And since these sentences must be suited to each place, it 
has been deemed appropriate to insert them here and build a Chapter around them’.



antonio castillo gómez62

(Petrucci 1993, 1-15), was also reflected in a wide display of epigraphy and other expressions of 
the visibile parlare in sacred spaces.9 During the early modern age the practice of placing large-sized 
inscriptions in the most relevant places of the churches continued uninterrupted. Culminating 
the approach to God, that was intended for the construction in height, a text of the Gospel of 
Matthew (16: 18-19) was inscribed at the base of the dome of St. Peter in Rome, between 1603 
and 1613, to remember the ecclesiastical mandate of Christ to Saint Peter: ‘TV ES PETRVS ET 
SVPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM ET TIBI DABO CLAVES 
REGNI CAELORUM’; while on the entablature of the main façade – by Carlo Maderno – another 
inscription of equal solemnity commemorated the culmination of the works in the time of Pope 
Paul V: ‘IN HONOREM PRINCIPIS APOST. PAVLVS V BVRGHESIVS ROMANVS PONT. 
MAX. AN. MDCXII. PONT. VII’ (Lansford 2009, 510, 526).

Inside St Peter’s basilica, the funerary monument of Urban VIII by Bernini, a true testimony of 
the baroque pathos of death (Petrucci 1998, 94), brings us closer to another of the most widespread 
types of visible words: funerary epigraphy. Despite the reluctance that different sectors of the 
Catholic Reformation showed towards ad sanctos burials, inside the churches, the funeral culture 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries encouraged them in large quantities, as had been the 
case since the fifth century, when Christianity put an end to the pagan disgust with the proximity 
of the dead. The protection of the martyrs was sought through those burials, not only for the 
mortal body of the deceased, but for their whole being, for the day of Resurrection and the last 
Judgement (Ariès 2011, 41-45 and 59-61). As Martín Carrillo, doctor in canons and member 
of a religious order, puts it in his Explicación de la bula de los difuntos (1615), this custom gave 
the deceased the opportunity to take advantage of the intercession of the patron saints of each 
temple and of the prayers of the faithful, as, meanwhile, the latter could find models of behaviour 
in the lives of the deceased. They could also become aware of the transience of life, which was 
remembered, according to this author, by the epitaphs: ‘Quién, llegando a una iglesia, viendo 
tantas sepulturas, tantos epitafios dellas, no se acordará que es mortal y se ha de ver bien librar 
en semejantes lugares, principalmente leyendo algunos epitafios curiosos’ (Carrillo 1615, 87v).10

One feature of the funerary culture of the modern age was the eloquence and size of the 
epitaphs, so that the brief pious exhortation of other times became, in the sixteenth century, 
the ‘edifying account of the life of the deceased’, within a modus operandi increasingly inclined 
to collective register, i.e. the memory of the whole family (Ariès 2011, 249). Accompanied on 
occasion by images and in some cases replaced by these, the inscriptions, often especially extensive, 
narrated the sad or glorious avatars of the deceased (figure 2). Thus, among the tombstones of 
the Roman churches in the sixteenth century, one lamented the death of Alberto, two and a half 
months old, the son of the baker of Pope Clement VII; while another lamented the death of the 
bricklayer Antonio di Treda, recounted the death of his wife and his daughter, who must have 
died tragically as the word ‘discratiata’ of the epitaph suggests (D’Achille 1987, 96, 98; Niccoli 
2010, 340-341). At a graphic level, the funerary memory of the early modern age confronted the 
clarity of the Renaissance tombs with baroque effects. In this period the epitaphs broke with the 
traditional epigraphic formats by dislocating the writing in curved and wavy lines, decomposing 
the text into sections, simulating non-stone materials as graphic spaces (wood, rags, paper, shells, 
skins) and resorting to polychromy (Petrucci 1998, 92-95).

9 The expression visibile parlare, coming from Dante’s Divina Commedia (Purgatorio, Canto X, 95), has been 
used to name different modalities of the exposed writing (Ciociola 1992 and 1997).

10 ‘Who, entering a church, seeing so many tombs, so many epitaphs on them, shall not remember that he is 
mortal and shall not consider it good to pass time in such places, mainly reading some curious epitaphs’.



words on walls 63

Figure 2 – Funerary monument of William Cokain (1626), partially destroyed in the great fire of London in 1661.  
Dugdale 1658, 65v., Guildhall Library, A 5.2 NO 6, London. Courtesy of Guilhdall Library, London

As much as some epitaphs suggest a different phenomenon, the funerary culture of those 
centuries is a good example of social and gender inequalities with respect to what Petrucci 
called the right to ‘writing death’ (1998, xvi). The language of the epitaphs, the location of 
the tombs and the different types – tombstones at ground level, embedded tombs, funerary 
monuments attached to the walls and, to a lesser extent, exempt tombs, seen negatively by 
the Church – contributed to perpetuate those inequalities among the living, at a time when 
there was a change in attitude towards death (Ariès 2011, 261-272).11 In the domains of 
the Spanish monarchy, the ostentation reached by some tombs motivated the intervention 
of the Church in the second half of the sixteenth century. In addition to combating the 
erection of exempt tombs, the Spanish synods issued rules to avoid some excesses that had 
been committed up to that time, in particular exaggerated luxury, the placement of pagan 
elements to identify the deceased and the exaltation of lineages by means of shields and other 
symbols (Martínez Gil 2000, 209; Polo Sánchez 2015, 390).

11 In addition to the aforementioned works by Armando Petrucci and Philippe Ariès, for Britain we can highlight 
the studies of Llewellyn 2000, Sherlock 2016 and Newstok 2009, the latter focused on the poetics of the epitaphs. 
For a comparison of burial cultures in London and Paris, see Harding 2002.



antonio castillo gómez64

Monumental, commemorative or funerary epigraphy symbolises the most visible and 
indelible aspect of the ecclesiastical graphosphere. Along with it, the interior of the temples was 
the scene of a preaching to the eyes that relied on the paintings hung on the walls, in which 
the images used to be accompanied by explanations or larger texts on the story represented in 
the painting or the life of the person portrayed. In addition, as had happened in the Middle 
Ages (Pritchard 1967; Champion 2015), the practice of graffiti inside churches was common 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was immortalised by the Dutch painters 
Pieter Saenredam, Gerard Houckgeest and Emanuel de Witte in some of their characteristic 
paintings of interiors (figure 3).

Figure 3 – Emmanuel de Witte, Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft (ca. 1650).  
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) - Public Domain Dedication

In the foreground you can see the moment when two boys paint, probably with charcoal, 
on the base of a temple column. Although profane, the theme does not clash with reality 
because the studies on graffiti in churches during the modern age have shown their thematic 
and social heterogeneity, in some cases linked to the specific use of the spaces where they were 
executed (Trentin 2010). In the baptistery of Parma, dates of birth and records of baptism 
were engraved on the marbles (Dall’Acqua 1976, 74). Even richer is the group of about 
one hundred and fifty graffiti, dated between the beginning of the sixteenth and the end of 
the nineteenth centuries, made on the frescoes of the oratory of San Sebastiano in Arborio, 
which thus became a true ‘palimpsest of senses’ (about this term, see Bailey 2007, 208). In 
them, we can see the preference of the authors for placing the inscriptions near the figures of 



words on walls 65

the saints, again seeking their protection, but also as a ‘form of bullying, of intimidation, to 
ensure that the saints do their job’ (Plesch 2014, 139). Furthermore, the graffiti in Arborio 
evidence the individuals who went to the oratory – pilgrims, shepherds, soldiers – and 
document events of critical importance for the town and its inhabitants (wars, plagues, 
good and bad harvests, etc.), which makes them a sort of inventory of fears. As they wrote 
on the wall, people assumed a certain level of control over the events and in this way their 
individual memories were incorporated into the collective register as a kind of community 
memorial (Plesch 2005, 2014 and 2018).

The walls of the temples also served for the dissemination of all kinds of pastoral notices 
on masses, festivities, prayers or sermons. In this sense, in the synod of the diocese of Toledo 
held in 1480 in Alcalá de Henares, it had been agreed that the principles of Christian doctrine 
be exposed in a ‘board’ to be hung from ‘un clavo en lugar público eminente donde cualquier 
persona la pueda leer e informarse de lo en ella contenido’.12 This mandate was later reproduced 
in different Hispanic synods of the sixteenth century and the location of the ‘board’ used to 
be the door, where the lists of sinners and those threatened with excommunication were also 
fixed (Castillo Gómez 2016a, 207-212).

By means of publications such as these, the Church intervened in the life of the community, 
publicising its precepts and publicly sanctioning those who did not comply. In certain cases, the 
disapproval of sinful behaviour was made visible by forcing the transgressors to wear around 
their necks a text with the account of the sin or crime committed. After stealing the flutes from 
the organ in the convent of Santa Catalina, in Barcelona, on 2 July 1612, Gabriel Monclús was 
forced to walk wearing a piece of parchment through the streets of the city.13 Likewise, on 23 July 
1648, the Venetian Inquisition sentenced the bookseller Giacomo Batti to stay one hour in front 
of the main door of St. Mark’s basilica with a candle in his hand, a rope around his neck and a 
sign confessing that he had sold forbidden books (see Infelise 2014, 191-192). In the case of a 
crime against the faith, the penitents were taken to the podium where the auto-da-fé was held, 
dressed with the signs of their infamy, and remained so, in view of all, during the whole act, each 
one bearing the symbols of their crimes and penalties. At the end of the act, the sanbenitos of 
those condemned and reconciled – bearing their names, professions, places of abode, crimes and 
condemnations inscribed – were to be exhibited in the churches where those people had been 
residents or parishioners. The sanbenitos were to be kept there permanently and in good condition 
– although that was not always the case – so that the despicable memory of the heretics and their 
descendants would not fall into oblivion (Castillo Gómez 2008; Peña Díaz 2012).

In line with what I have just mentioned about the board of doctrines, it should also be noted 
that the bill entitled Regole di costumi christiani a voi scolari, printed in Italy in the 1570s-1580s, 
was probably also exhibited, along with catechism schools, in churches and other public places 
as an expression of the zeal of the Church, just after the Council of Trent, in the surveillance of 
‘each stage of the life of the faithful’ (Niccoli 2004, 32-34; Niccoli 2010, 344). In the educational 
context, the school iconography at the beginning of the modern age includes the use of certain 
forms of exposed writing for teaching. This is clear from the engravings reproduced on the 
cover of some editions of the Exercitium grammaticale puerorum per dietas distributum, whose 

12 Constituciones de los Arzobispados de Toledo y Tarragona en los siglos XIV-XV, Biblioteca Nacional de España, 
Madrid, MSS/3021, 97r-v. See Castillo Gómez 2016a, 208 (‘a nail in an eminent public place where anyone may 
read them and find out what is contained therein’).

13 Pergamí Gabriel Monclús, Arxiu Històric, Pergamins Municipals, S/R, Barcelona. His transcript can be seen 
in Expósito i Amagat 2016, 36.



antonio castillo gómez66

first edition was printed in the 1480s in Haguenau (Bas-Rhin), and specifically the editions of 
Strasbourg in 1502 and 1504 (figure 4) (see Reicke 1979, 17); and likewise in the Cartilla para 
mostrar a leer a los moços (ca. 1526) (Infantes 1998, IV). All of them show some kind of written 
boards hanging on the wall; in the Latin grammar behind the teacher and in the Spanish primer 
in the background. The latter shows separate letters that could correspond to the alphabet, while 
in the German manual some lines of text can also be made out. Both details suggest an object 
similar to the hornbooks or ABCs used in modern England, personal tablets that included the 
alphabet, the basic syllables, the Lord’s Prayer and the articles of faith, as was typical of a teaching 
tradition always associated with religious instruction (Lamb 2018, 29-70). In England, at the end 
of the sixteenth century, John Hart, author of a fast-learning method for the English language, 
also considered the use of mural alphabets for educational purposes, but not only in schools: ‘if 
the figures with their letters wer drawen on the walles, pillers, and posters, of churches, tounes, 
and houses, they moughte muche helpe and further the ignorant of al letters, to atteine to reade’ 
(Hart 1570, sig. *ijr; see Fleming 2001, 50).

Figure 4 – Mural alphabet to teach reading, Exercitium grammaticale puerorum per dietas distributum, 
[Strasburg, Husner], 1504. Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Münich, 870259 4 L.lat. 191 

3. The Urban Space as a Public Graphosphere

As an instrument of communication in its broadest sense, exposed writing reached its apogee in 
the cities of the early modern age, which were turned into genuine public graphospheres.14 The 

14 I borrow this term from Franklin (2011, 531), who has used it to study the same phenomenon in Franklin 
2017; 2019, 1-10.



words on walls 67

halls of power published their mandates, regulations and other provisions by means of public 
announcements and, increasingly, by fixing documents in the busiest places of the city, initially 
as manuscripts and from the mid-sixteenth century mainly in printed formats (Castillo Gómez 
2016a, 200-206; Castro Rojas 2016 and 2019; Bruni 2017; Cumby 2017). In the forties, this 
was a dilemma for the French authorities, suspicious of the trivialisation and falsification that 
the mass production of this type of documents could involve, against the greater security and 
control offered by the publication by means of royal criers (Fogel 1989, 105).

The shops, in turn, were identified by signs placed on the doors – as can be seen in engravings 
by William Hogarth – where lists of products and prices were also put on view (Welch 2005, 
137-139). According to the testimonies that have been preserved, writing teachers and theatre 
companies usually resorted to bills to announce classes and productions: the former, as may seem 
logical, in manuscript formats (D’Haenens 1983); the latter, also in manuscript formats in the 
domains of the Spanish monarchy (Reyes Peña 2015), while in Shakespearean London printed 
single-sheets were used (Stern 2006). Leaving aside catalogues of fairs – such as Leipzig’s – and 
booksellers, the sale of books was promoted by showing them on the street and announcing 
them by means of bills such as the one that Giulio Cesare Croce had composed in 1608 with 
the index of all his works (figure 5). He was not satisfied with just reciting and singing his 
poems through the streets of Bologna or selling them in opuscules; he also turned to printed 
advertising in order to broaden the circle of his readers (Zanardi 2009).

Figure 5 – Indice di tutte l’opere di Giulio Cesare Dalla Croce. In Bologna, appresso Bartolomeo Cocchi, 1608. 
Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, MS 3878, c.[51]. 

Courtesy of Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna



antonio castillo gómez68

This type of paper ephemera fulfilled an informative function, but in the case of edicts, 
proclamations and other mandates, the public exposure of the document also contributed 
to the visibility of power and social order (Petrucci 1996, vi-viii). As a consequence, their 
design combined readability with propagandistic sense, as simultaneously happened in 
the typographical bills of literary contests and in the announcements of academic theses.15 
Typography introduced, in all of them, significant improvements in the organisation of the 
text by distinguishing sections and levels of information; in turn, coats of arms and figures 
on the header acted as signs of representation of the authority, the institution organising 
the festivity, the person or saint celebrated, or the sponsors and academic principals. In the 
bills advertising theses, the employment of Latin suggests a preferentially educated public, 
despite the fact that they were placed in the university colleges and on occasion on the doors 
of some churches and other buildings. The bills were initially manuscript, but in the second 
half of the sixteenth century the printed format prevailed, with the prior authorisation of the 
rector or another authority: in Germany printed bills are already documented in 1560 (Kirwan 
2017); in France, the first appeared in the Protestant universities of Orthez and Lescar, 
between 1585 and 1592, while in the Sorbonne 127 bills were printed between 1588 and 
1660 (Walsby 2017); and with regard to the Hispanic universities, the first remaining bill 
advertising a thesis is the examination that Pedro Balli took on 26 August 1584, ‘hora nona 
antimeridies’, to obtain the degree of doctor in Law at the Royal and Pontifical University 
of Mexico (Fernández de Zamora 2015, 21-22).

The communication instrumentalised through the different kinds of exposed writings 
cannot be explained only by consideration of them as texts to be read. It must be taken into 
account that many texts were published or circulated while interacting with orality: be it 
edicts, previously proclaimed by the crier; or libels, whose mobilising effect was increased 
by the wide diffusion through handwritten and printed copies, reading in the street and easy 
memorisation of many of them, as they were written as dialogues or with accessible rhymes 
(De Vivo 2007, 200-248; Castillo Gómez 2016b, 121-152). As has been pointed out in 
relation to the English ballads, street reception was deeply influenced by the relationship 
that the presenter established with the audience through the use of several strategies: ways of 
addressing the public, exhortations to promote certain reactions and a colloquial language 
with frequent insertion of proverbs and sayings (Würzbach 2011, 54-74). 

Many of these texts used images as well, sometimes to ridicule the people insulted 
in defamatory libels; in other cases, to emphasise the criticism formulated in many of 
the pamphlets distributed in the religious and political conflicts of the early modern age, 
initially with the Lutheran reform – deeply linked to printed propaganda (Scribner 1994; 
Pettegree 2017) – then the anticlerical pasquinades of Renaissance Italy (Niccoli 2005), 
the French wars of religion (Debbagi Baranova 2012), the revolts in different places of the 
Spanish monarchy in the time of Philip IV (Hugon and Merle 2016) or the English civil 
war (Peacey 2004). In each of these instances, pamphlets – fixed on the walls or distributed 
through the streets – were used to intervene in the public opinion of the time, just as was the 
case with books, sermons and theatre (Briggs and Burke 2009, 61-89). Their effectiveness as 
instruments of opinion is beyond doubt as revealed – by way of illustration – by the letter 
that the Bishop of Valence, Jean Monluc, wrote on 8 January 1573 to Charles IX of France 

15 For the bills designed to announce the literary contests organised during the festivities for the proclamation 
of a king, births and funerals in the royal family or canonisation of saints, among other outstanding events, see 
Castillo Gómez 2011; Osuna and Infantes 2011.



words on walls 69

justifying the use of libels for his duty to defend the reputation of the sovereign, questioned 
by the intense Protestant propaganda that was disseminated during the wars of religion (see 
Debbagi Baranova 2012, 337).

Yet, it was in monumental epigraphy that exposed writing best evidenced its meaning as 
a figurative device. This can be said of the inscriptions painted in the ephemeral constructions 
erected in public displays, but mainly for those carved in stone. Some had an advertising 
function because they contained a summary of the mandates of public authorities, such 
as the ‘lapidi prohibitorie’ used in Italy in the seventeenth century and, especially, in the 
eighteenth century, to warn of the penalties and sanctions incurred when throwing garbage 
into the street, playing ball on, or putting a market stall near the wall of a church (Petrucci 
1993, 84-85). Within this modality of ‘epigraphic edicts’, in Lisbon a plaque placed in 1686 
reported an order of King Peter II regulating the transit of carriages in Salvador Street (figure 
6). This street was back then an important communication junction, as it linked the Castle 
of São Jorge with A Baixa, but its middle stretch was narrow and this fact caused disputes 
over whether the carriages that went up or those that went down had right of way (Soares, 
Barreto and Markl 2007, 114).

Figure 6 – Epigraph on the regulation of carriage traffic in Lisbon, 1686,  
Photo by Ivan Batinic / Alamy Foto de stock.  

By permission of the Universidad de Alcalá, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Alcalá de Henares, Madrid

Other forms of exposed writings had a clear celebratory and propagandistic intention, and were 
therefore manufactured with a greater care in the epigraphic composition, for the inscription 
operated as a representation of the authority that had ordered its placement. To see this phe-
nomenon, it is enough to go through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome and its urban 
transformation, where a large amount of monuments were erected to extol the grandeur of the 
caput mundi and the power of the Popes (figure 7). Everywhere, gates, arches and fountains 



antonio castillo gómez70

were erected, with their accompanying inscriptions in large and elegant humanistic capitals as 
‘an important part of the visual power system’, aimed at praising the figure of the promoters 
of those changes (Paolucci 2016, 9).

Figure 7 – Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, erected in the time of Pope Paul V, Rome, 1612,  
Photo by Antonio Castillo Gómez. Courtesy of the Author

In this kind of materialisation, the written text could be read alphabetically, though it was 
certainly perceived mainly as a visual product on the whole. Moreover, for a large part of 
that society, the interpretation of the epigraphs was hindered not only by illiteracy, but also 
by certain graphic resources used in the epigraphic composition – such as inscribed letters, 
so characteristic in some epigraphic cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – 
and by the frequent use of Latin, although its stereotyped and formulaic character could 
make up for the inexperience that many had in the use of that language. Therefore, limiting 
the interpretation of epigraphic production and even other exposed writing from the early 
modern centuries to an alphabetical reading would entail disregarding the symbolic and 
propagandistic meaning intrinsic to the flamboyant solemnity of a part of that production. 
This type of inscriptions conveyed a meaning through their letters, but also through their 
material form, their relation with other discourses – especially the iconographic discourse – 
and by their position within the monumental ensemble.

Inscribed in the public space, the different kinds of exposed writing showed all their 
performative capacity as ‘acts of writing’ (Fraenkel 2007). Insofar as they made visible the 
governing ideology or the criticism thereof, their concurrence created a place of dispute. This 
happened with the bronze decree that Sophia Alekseyevna, Regent of Russia from 1682 to 
1689, had placed in the Red Square in Moscow, legitimising the acts of the nobles who had 
taken her to power, while Peter the Great, proclaimed Tsar when he was ten, after the death 



words on walls 71

of his brother Theodore III, and his mother, were removed from the court. At the end of the 
regency, the decree was destroyed (Franklin 2017, 348; and 2019, 148).

By destroying or replacing certain inscriptions and symbols (arms and emblems), people 
intervened in the memory and in the re-signification of public spaces, as was highlighted in 
the Neapolitan revolt against Philip IV. Initially, as the revolt was a popular reaction against 
a rise in taxes on consumption, its leader, the fisherman Masaniello, did not suppress the 
Habsburg arms, but ordered the placement next to them of a shield crowned with an uppercase 
P in the centre of the blazon as an expression of the People. Simultaneously, around 11 or 
13 July 1647, in the Market Square, began the works of an epitaph, on whose walls boards 
with the clauses of the agreement between the rebels and the viceroy, the Duke of Arcos, were 
to be placed: ‘Detto Viceré, per dar forma a quello che haveva promesso e dar loco che esso 
non solo volse sodisfatione per li detti Capitoli, ma ancora aggiungere altri di sua volontà, si 
diede ordine che si facesse l’epitaffio in mezzo del Mercato per fare scolpire in marmo detti 
capitoli’ (Fuidoro 1994, 65).16 The famous architect Cosimo Fanzago was employed to that 
end, thus highlighting, according to Alain Hugon, the ‘will to magnify the construction of 
a monument that celebrated the recovered Concord’ (2011, 304).

From the autumn on, the revolt entered a markedly political phase that culminated with 
the proclamation, for a few months, of the Most Serene Republic of Naples, commanded from 
November by the Duke of Guise, thus rehabilitating French influence in southern Italy. At 
the end of January 1648, Neapolitan independence came to an end with the capture of the 
city by the troops of John Joseph of Austria. During the period that the Republic maintained 
its independence, Duke Henry of Guise ordered that the arms of Philip IV be removed 
from the gates and be replaced by his own arms, the acronym SPQN (Senatus Populusque 
Neapolitanus) and the word Libertas as an expression of republican power. This dispute on 
symbols was also manifested in coins, paintings, images and even the calendar of saints’ days 
(Hugon 2011, 291-326).

As for the mandates of the authority, their public exposure decisively influenced the acts 
of disobedience held against them. On the one hand, we may recall the judicial proceedings for 
contempt, such as the one instituted by the Council of the Supreme Inquisition in September 
1559, to identify the people who had ‘removed and detached from the said church’ an edict 
on forbidden books that was to be exposed in the door of the Cathedral of Coria (Cáceres, 
Spain) for thirty days. Under the jurisdiction of the Republic of Venice, during the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, there were various acts of insubordination towards the edicts, 
which were broken into pieces and ‘befouled’ amidst public disorder instigated not only by 
the people, but also by the nobles (De Vivo 2007, 132-133). On the other hand, we find the 
confrontation between Venice and Rome as a result of a Papal Decree, of April 1606, which 
excommunicated the Doge and the Senate and banned all religious functions in the Republic. 
Apart from the subsequent libel war, the Venetian authorities initially prevented the public 
exhibition of the pontifical proclamation at the entrance of Basilica di San Marco, while the 
‘protest’ written by Paolo Sarpi in opposition to the initiative of Paul V, was printed on large 
bills and fixed on the doors of the churches (De Vivo 2007, 164-167).

16 ‘This viceroy, in order to shape what he had promised and to show satisfaction for the aforementioned 
Agreements while contributing of his own accord, ordered that an epitaph be placed amid the Market Square so 
that said Agreements may be sculpted in marble’.



antonio castillo gómez72

4. Between Norm and Transgression

The existence of a dominus that, as pointed out by Petrucci (1986, xxi), determines the use of 
the spaces used for the placement of the writing and, in some circumstances, also its formal 
characteristics and means of appropriation, implies the distinction between legitimate or 
authorised kinds of exposed writings and those that may constitute a subversion of the norm. In 
Lyon, for example, the municipality intervened in 1651 against the profusion of unauthorised 
notices fixed on streets and squares, some even on the door of the City Hall (Béroujon 2009, 
158). Yet, in Elizabethan England, the spread of graffiti in domestic spaces and churches may 
indicate a certain permissiveness. It had nothing to do, in the opinion of Juliet Fleming (2001, 
40), with the connotation of illegality which it acquired in the mid-nineteenth century.

Historically analysed, the practice of graffiti is more complex, although its distinction 
from other forms of exposed writing may be understood as referring to ‘any unofficial 
inscription (or image), drawn freehand on a surface (architectural or otherwise) whose main 
function differs from that of the supports commonly used for writing or drawing’ (Bucherie 
1983, 486). But this ‘unofficial’ character – it might be better to say spontaneous – does 
not necessarily mean communicative transgression as is inferred from a large part of the 
legacies from the early modern age. In Italy, the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino – considered by 
Baltasar Castiglione in Il Cortegiano (1528) one of the most beautiful palaces of the Italian 
Renaissance – is in itself a ‘palazzo da leggere’ (‘a palace to be read’) because of the large 
number of writings on its walls. Some are monumental inscriptions, such as the one that 
honours, in Latin and in beautiful humanistic capitals, Federico da Montefeltro, who ordered 
the construction of the palace. The initials F. C. (Federicus Comes) and FE. DUX (Federicus 
Dux) are repeated on all doors and in other places, as are the family’s arms, placed there to 
communicate who held control over those spaces, which does not mean that the owners 
determined the communicative instrumentation thereof. Other writings are graffiti in different 
languages – Italian, Latin, French, German and Spanish – that follow one another from the 
fifteenth century to our day with multiple messages in consonance with the functions that 
the palace had: residence, theatre and university in the modern age, and, in the nineteenth 
century, a partial use as a prison (Sarti 2007, 2009 and 2017).

Regarding prisons – a privileged space for graffiti – we know that in France between 1839 
and 1972 prisoners had an obligation to keep their cells clean, from which it can be deduced 
that writing on the walls was sanctioned along with other communications (Sanchez 2018, 
66). On the contrary, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a different penitentiary 
regime and the cells usually located in dark and unhealthy rooms, it seems that there was 
a certain tolerance, at least in the inquisitorial prisons (Civale 2017, 265). Meanwhile, the 
exchange of messages between prisoners and the outside was more seriously controlled – at 
least by regulation – and probably more so in the prisons of the Holy Office (Silva 2011; 
Braga 2015, 109-132 and 177-271; Castillo Gómez 2016a, 96-118).17

What to say about graffiti in churches and shrines? Their profusion suggests that the 
faithful and the ecclesiastical authorities tolerated them and even understood them as a form 
of devotional expression. The aforementioned oratory of San Sebastiano in Arborio constitutes 
a palimpsest of meanings due to the plurality of the messages that were superimposed on its 

17 Graffiti and prison writings have merited a number of approaches in recent times, among them Candau 
and Hameau 2004; Sherman and Sheils 2009; Ahnert 2013, 33-42; and Castillo Gómez 2018, which includes a 
historiographic review. For the rich collection of the Palermo Inquisitorial Prison, see Civale 2017, Fiume 2017a 
and 2017b, and the recent compilations of Fiume and García-Arenal (2018a and 2018b).



words on walls 73

frescoes. Names, dates and devotional writings are likewise present in the walls of two basilicas: 
San Giulio, on the homonymous islet on Lake Orta and San Zeno in Verona (Plesch 2002 
and 2007), as well as in different rural churches of Trentino in Italy, along the valleys of the 
rivers Cismon and Vanoi, bearing devotional graffiti, acronyms and names of people from the 
seventeenth to the twentieth centuries (Antonelli 2006, 87-93). In a different sense but with 
similar permission, scholars and visitors of the Malatestiana Library in Cesena left their marks 
there from its opening in 1454 until our time (Errani and Palma 2018). In turn, in modern 
Rome, artists – some of them relatively well-known – who had settled there in their formative 
stages, as well as lovers of art, soldiers and tourists alike wrote on the ancient paintings of the 
Villa Adriana in Tivoli, the frescoes of Rafael in the Vatican or on the Carracci gallery in the 
Farnese palace as a testimony of their admiration for the painters and their works (Guichard 
2014). Lastly, as nowadays, graffiti also attracted the attention of the university world. In the 
Old Treasury at St. John’s College, Cambridge, are several signature inscriptions by former 
fellows at the college, some of them dated (Underwood 1980, 23-26).18

While some graffiti were tolerated and even well regarded, others were rejected and even 
persecuted for different reasons. For Joseph Hall, author of the dystopian Fooliana (1605), it 
was in bad taste that ‘the houses are all passinglie well painted within, especially with the names 
of their ancestry, their guests, and acquaintance, gracefully delineate with coale and candle’, 
which led him to add the marginal note: ‘muro bianco carta di matto: A white wall is a foole’s 
book’ (Fleming 2001, 49). Likewise, an edict of the rector of the Roman Studium Urbis, issued 
in 1689, severely forbade ‘che alcuno non ardisca dipingere e scrivere coi carboni, lapis, gesso 
et altri instrumenti nelli muri, porte, capitelli, finestre, colonne, cornici, cathedre, ò banhi’.19 
Apart from pointing out the different ways of writing or painting graffiti and the multiplicity 
of surfaces, the mandate was expressly aimed at ‘figure, massime dishoneste, lettere, segni, 
caratteri, versi, motti, lineamenti, armi, insegne, et in qual si voglia modo imbrattatarli, etiam 
che si pingessero, o scrivessero cose buone’ (cf. Petrucci 1986, 117-118).20 Beyond the nature 
of the message, it was thought important to avoid the ‘soiling’ of spaces that did not have 
communicative function.21 For mainly aesthetic reasons, a proclamation of the city of Arezzo 
prohibited the drawing of ‘signs, scribbles or other things with coal or something similar’ in the 
building of Loggia della Misericordia, decorated by Giorgio Vasari (Welch 2005, 121). A more 
exhaustive tracking of the municipal ordinances is however missing in order to understand how 
the regulation of the public space set forth in the ordinances of Barcelona in 1302 evolved in 
the following four centuries: ‘‘Que ningú non gosi pintar, ni escriure a les tàpies o partes dels 

18 Likewise, in several windows on the ground floor of the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso in Alcalá de Henares, 
a number of incised graffiti have been recovered bearing the symbol of the ‘victor’, names and unfinished scribblers 
as probatio pennae, among which several students and chaplains from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries have 
been identified (Serrano Pozuelo 2008). Their execution and location differentiates them from other ‘victors’ painted 
on the walls for clearly celebratory purposes, though not only for academic merits. For a discussion on these, see 
Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares and Weruaga Prieto 2011. In Italy, university celebrations were materialised by the 
placement of coats of arms, as can be seen in the Archiginnasio and in the vaults of the cloister of the Collegio 
di Spagna, both in Bologna, and in the Palazzo Bo, the historical seat of the University of Padua since 1539. See 
Rossetti and Dalla Francesca 1987, Benucci 2007 and Brizzi 2011.

19 ‘Anyone to paint and write with charcoal, pencil, chalk or other instruments on walls, doors, chapiters, 
windows, columns, cornices, chairs or benches’.

20 ‘Any figure, dishonest expression, letters, signs, characters, verses, mottos, portraits, arms, emblems, or to 
soil them in any way, even when agreeable things are painted on written’ (Petrucci 1993, 92-93).

21 The misappropriation of the space, the use of non-canonical writings and the content of the messages form the three 
levels of communicative transgression applied to graffiti, especially in more recent versions (Gimeno Blay 1997, 14-21).



antonio castillo gómez74

carrers o camins, i que tot el que tingui pintades o escrits en les seves parets o tàpies que les faci 
treure’ (Batlle i Gallart and Vinyoles i Vidal 2002, 17).22

What happens when the graffiti or any other kind of exposed writing openly questions the 
power relations, the moral system or the normal development of an activity? In situations like this, 
complacency was much rarer. In 1591 the attacks of the students of Padua against the Jesuits by 
means of mural writings provoked a crisis that ended with the closing of the Company’s school (De 
Vivo 2007, 141). A clear ideological motivation was also put forward by the Jesuit Jerónimo López 
against the graffiti that he found in Valencia and Salamanca when he went there to preach, in 1651 
and 1653 respectively. As soon as he stepped in both cities, he warned that the ‘walls, doors and 
hallways of many houses, streets and squares’ were defaced with obscene and blasphemous messages. 
Outraged, he devoted the occasional sermon to the subject, and from the pulpit he harangued the 
people to erase them. He even threatened to do so himself ‘going through the streets with a pot of 
lime, mixed with water, erasing these abominable and ugly things with a brush’. But it did not go 
beyond that. The faithful obeyed and immediately a group of people, led by nobles and priests, got 
down to work (Naja 1678, 276-277, 299). In those years there was also a notable scandal in Lyon 
due to insolent writings and graffiti figures on the walls of the Hôtel de Ville and other locations in 
its quarter in 1652. In response, the municipal authorities approved a salary of 600 pounds a year 
and lodging in the Hôtel de Ville for a guard to make sure that those events did not happen again 
(Béroujon 2009, 159). Finally, in February 1664, the governor of Rome and Vice Camerlengo, 
Monsignor Giovanni Nicola Conti, published a proclamation, periodically repeated, sanctioning 
those who disturbed the development of classes in the Jesuit College, including especially those 
who wrote or drew, with ‘inchiostro, carbone, lapis, gesso, ò altra materia, ò pur con ferri, ò altri 
instrumenti’ (Archivio di Stato di Roma, Bandi, vol. 410),23 on the ‘mura, pilastri, porte, finestre, 
pavimenti, libri e carte di detto Collegio’ (cf. Petrucci 1982, 43).24

More conspicuously, the permissiveness in the case of libels and pasquinades was inversely 
proportional to the degree to which they questioned authority and moral order. It should be 
kept in mind that in Rome the festival of Pasquino was funded by the popes, who in fact were 
quite indulgent with the publication of pasquinades until the Council of Trent. From then 
on, the situation changed in the Catholic countries. This became evident after the censorship 
of the literary genre of the pasquinades decreed by Paul IV and Pius V (Niccoli 2005, 128-
157; Fragnito 2006). In the same vein, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum published in 1583 
by Inquisitor Gaspar de Quiroga condemned the writing and dissemination of pasquinades, 
libels or songs with messages that were heretical or critical towards the religious authorities:

Item se prohiben todos los pasquines o libelos infamatorios y famosos, debaxo de cualquier titulo y nombre 
salgan o se escriban e intitulen, en los cuales con autoridades y palabras de la Sagrada Escritura se dicen y 
tratan cosas y materia profanas. Y lo mismo se entienda de todas las canciones, coplas, sonetos, prosas, versos 
y rimas, en cualquier lengua compuestas, que traten cosas de la Sagrada Escritura, interpretándola contra 
su debida reverencia y respeto, profanamente y a otros propósitos contra lo que común y ordinariamente 
la santra madre Iglesia romana admite y usa. (Martínez de Bujanda 2016, 60)25

22 ‘It is forbidden to paint or write on the enclosures or walls of the streets or roads, and anyone who has 
painted or written on their walls or enclosures is to erase all of them’.

23 ‘ink, coal, pencil, chalk or any other matter, even with irons or other instruments’.
24 ‘walls, pilasters, doors, windows, pavements, books and documents’. 
25 ‘All pasquinades as well as defamatory or reputable libels are prohibited, regardless of the title or name under 

which they are published or written and entitled, wherein using authorities and words from the Holy Scripture, 
profane things and matters are said and discussed. And the same prohibition is to apply to all songs, ballads, sonnets, 
prose, verses and rhymes, composed in any language, which discuss things from the Holy Scripture, interpreting 
it without due reverence and respect, profanely or with other purposes, against the uses ordinarily admitted by the 
Holy Mother Roman Church’.



words on walls 75

A common consequence was moral condemnation, in the form of the penalty of excommunication, 
decreed both against the authors or inspirers of libels and against those who, having seen them 
on the wall, did not detach, break and denounce them. Such a consequence is alluded to by the 
edicts promulgated for the persecution of libels, pastoral visits, collections of sermons, manuals 
of confessors and, to be sure, synodal provisions (Castillo Gómez 2013, 313-317).

In conclusion, this approach to the functions and uses of exposed writing has tried to show 
the scope and richness of the field, pointing out some of the spaces where inscriptions were made 
and some of their functions. Existing from the very origins of writing, it is undeniable that in 
the early modern age these writings experienced a golden age stimulated by the development of 
literacy, the diffusion of the printing press and, in general, by the importance of writing within the 
social organisation, albeit that the dissemination of exposed writing was far from homogeneous. A 
more detailed study would provide a basis for clarifying the chronology of the phenomenon while 
highlighting the particularities of each cultural, political and religious context. However, with some 
peculiarities derived from the different degree of literacy as well as political and religious differences, 
a common feature in Europe at that time, at least in its western part, was the massive presence of 
exposed writing in domestic spaces, interiors with different functions and, above all, the public 
space. It was frequently advised that the texts should be made using clear and visible letters but, of 
course, there are exceptions that prove the rule. Many graffiti clearly violated this norm both because 
of their location and because of graphic inexperience, due to the semi-literacy of the writer or the 
difficulties derived from some walls. Likewise, defamatory bills were often written by disguising 
the writing, i.e. with a clumsy layout (figure 8), often mixing upper case and lower case, in order 
to better ensure that the offence would remain anonymous (Evangelisti 2018, 13-87).

Figure 8 – Notarial reproduction of the defamatory libel against two friars published in Faenza.  
Courtesy of Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali - Archivio di Stato di Bologna, Tribunale del Torrone, reg. 1648, c. 198v.



antonio castillo gómez76

Solemn inscriptions make power and social stratification visible in many buildings or funeral 
monuments. The institutions of power, ranging from the king to the municipality and including 
the ecclesiastical authorities among others, made use of more ephemeral instruments, both 
manuscript and printed, to display their authority and publish mandates that should be known 
by the entire population. But since the public space was not only at the service of power, political 
contestation, religious dissidence, social tension or personal confrontation were also visible 
there, mainly through libels and pasquinades, but on occasion also by means of graffiti. The 
latter were particularly common in private homes, churches, taverns, universities, prisons and 
libraries, among other places, with very varied purposes: ranging from a willingness to leave 
testimony of one’s presence at that place to devotion or affirmation of identity, as can be seen 
in other graffiti. Furthermore, with the emergence of a pre-capitalist economic structure, the 
first signs of commercial advertising made their entrance in the streets and squares.

There are obvious differences between monumental inscriptions, commercial 
advertisements, libels and graffiti. Likewise, their placement in a street where everyone could 
see them or in a church, a prison or a domestic space entailed different functions. Depending 
on the place of exposure and the type of writing, they were used to question their contemporary 
society in one way or another; the questions that arise today, when we study the presence of 
these types of writing during that period, are just as manifold.

Works Cited

Manuscript Source

Constituciones de los Arzobispados de Toledo y Tarragona en los siglos XIV-XV, Biblioteca Nacional de 
España, Madrid, MSS/13021, 95-127.

Printed Sources

Ahnert Ruth (2013), The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge 
University Press.

Antonelli Quinto (2006), W.A.B.L. Epigrafia popolare alpina, Tonadico, Ente Parco Naturale Paneveggio 
Pale di San Martino.

Ariès Philippe (2011), El hombre ante la muerte, trans. by Mauro Armiño, Madrid, Taurus (original 
edition, L’Homme devant la mort, Paris, Seuil, 1977).

Bailey G.N. (2007), ‘Times Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time’, Journal of 
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