Project description
The Papal court in the 16th Century: an information hub
Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the Antechamber project will examine the 16th-century Roman court as a global information hub. Rather than looking at this court strictly as the centre of the papal government, the project places it within the global dynamics of news and the construction of contemporary knowledge. By investigating the abundant archives of Camillo Capilupi – a papal secret chamberlain and subsequent prothonotary – this study offers a situated analysis of transnational political cultures. Such an approach highlights the work practices of ‘minor’ court actors in disseminating news and questions the mixture of formal and informal flows of information in the construction of contemporaneity in the early modern age.
Objective
The issue of the production, control and (mis)use of information has taken on particular importance with the growing development of new media and the development of arguments, often falsely perceived as new, on the subject of fake news. What happens when an acceleration and change in modes of communication overturns our habits and frameworks of thought? The 16th century is precisely the kind of laboratory where we can study these questions with the distance of historical time. This century saw an unprecedented acceleration of the information and communication system, to an extent that remained unparalleled until the invention of the electric telegraph.
The analysis follows Camillo Capilupi (1531-1604) who acted behind the scenes of one of the major information factories of the time, Rome and the papal court. He was a papal secret chamberlain and agent of the Duke of Mantua. His double service explains his need to put information on paper: he reported everything to the Duke, not without passing on rumors and world news. His unexplored archives allow us to look beyond the stage of official texts or well-known correspondence, to observe the dissemination of information steeped in politics, culture and religion.
This study will navigate around the papal palace: moving from rooms for receptions, to the anterooms, to hear noises in the corridors, to have a look on the news sheets that were exchanged there, before they spread throughout the peninsula and far beyond. The protagonists of this project are those who are not usually considered as first-rate historical actors, the ‘minor’ figures of the court. The hypothesis is that these ‘little hands’ who manipulated information about both the court and the world played a crucial role in disseminating constructions of contemporaneity and thus contributed to the cultural dynamics of proto-globalization.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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4051 Basel
Switzerland
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