After reading these essays and articles on medieval graffiti practices and images, I am once again confronted with the contradictions in basic definitions of graffiti. While many of the articles posited medieval graffiti as a normal, encouraged (or tolerated) practice of self-presentation, preservation, documentation, remembrance and communication, the article by Ritsema van Eck exposed the ways in which medieval graffiti was disapproved of by some at the sacro monte of Varallo. Van Eck articulates the challenges at arriving “at any sort of definitive conclusions about graffiti as either authorized or illicit writings in the absence of explicit bans or other types of documented disapproval or approval” (54). This is not to say that I am searching for scholarly consensus on the interpretation and acceptance of medieval graffiti–that is, of course, a preposterous expectation that erases and abstracts a diversity of perspectives, interpretations, and intentions during the Middle Ages. This is simply to point out the rich and thought-provoking nature of diverse scholarly opinions on graffiti.
Graffiti tags serve as a form of constructing immortality––perhaps out of a fear of oblivion. Graves and Rollason argue that “inscribing your name in the fabric of a building is never merely simple, but acts as a way of perpetuating your presence, and identifying with, or in some contexts defying, others associated with that building” (212). In the context of religious spaces, graffiti perhaps served to document pilgrimage, offer prayer, or, as O’Donnell writes, “invigorates intercessional prayer” (82). When inscribed in religious spaces, Matthew Champion argues that studying medieval graffiti enable scholars to infer how ordinary people interacted with the church in a quotidian context. Champion argues that graffiti has the “potential to show us how those ordinary people interacted with the church as an institution and as a building.” In analyzing graffiti locations within a religious space, one may be able to infer the ways in which people engaged with the church, performed and practiced piety, and presented and preserved devotion.
Having never explicitly studied medieval visual and material culture, I am fascinated and captivated by these accounts and cases of graffiti images and writing. I am curious to learn more about different takes on the additive and destructive visions of graffiti.