Antechamber · Looking at global information flows from the 16th century papal court

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.