Communicative transactions
Each of the communication spheres presented so far also needed to communicate with the others. This chapter analyses their contacts and conflicts. First, it discusses the interaction between literate and oral communication, suggesting that literacy was itself a drive for social transactions. It then addresses the official publication of laws and decrees: for all its secretiveness, the government's authority rested on its capacity to reach out to the subjects. Yet official publication also often led to resistance, as people prevented publication and destroyed decrees. Thus, normative messages never dominated the city's public space, but had to compete with alternative forms of public communication, for example graffiti and posted texts (Venice's equivalent of the Roman pasquinades). The chapter concludes with a case study of one such texts, the Paternoster degli Spagnoli, which circulated widely during the French wars of religion and beyond, as a critical parody of political domination.
Keywords: orality and literacy, official publication, resistance, pasquinades, graffiti, French Wars of Religion, paternoster, parody
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