In Rafaella Sarti’s essay, she focuses on debunking the idea that binary oppositions (inscriptions/graffiti, institutional/domestic, public/private) do not necessarily apply to the Ducal palace of Urbino. Boundaries are much more complex and blurred than one would think.
A couple of the essays talk about how “chronicle-like notes are, in particular, a genre that is by now virtually extinct (Sarti 68).” In Fleming’s essay, she makes the point that the way we view and wrap our heads around Elizabethan wall-writing is through a contemporary lens; our own biases of what graffiti should be make it difficult to view graffiti of the past “in its own terms (Fleming 34).”
One point that Fleming brings up that I found interesting is the fact that there is no verb to describe the action of creating graffiti. The absence of a verb for the action in the English language really just adds to how individual and secretive the act is. For there not to be a word for this action inflects “the notions of agency that centre on its production (Fleming 39).
Plesch’s essay goes into the reasoning for why graffiti was so popular at Arborio. For the people who came and wrote on the walls of this “liminal” place, the act of recording events is “a means to appropriate them, to claim them (Plesch 142).” For many of these people, graffiti was a way for them to cope with events beyond their control. The act itself is cathartic.
I personally really enjoyed the Horselads essay; it gave insight into an otherwise forgotten group of people. This essay really shows how valuable graffiti can be in teaching us about a significant group of people who have contributed to society and yet are not given much attention in official histories.