These articles on early modern graffiti continue to show the importance of studying graffiti to give first hand local history (Giles), explain how graffiti can be perceived as a ritual (Plesch), and continue the debate on how to define graffiti (Fleming, Gordon, Sarti).
Plesch makes a perfect comparison between the graffiti in a chapel at Arborio to ritualization. This is done by comparing both the surface of graffiti and the location of the church on the edge of Arborio to liminal spaces, and because the graffiti was written with a constant syntax. This ritual was shown to be a cathartic way of forgetting the past and also making the future predictable. This article prompted me to question if the chapel was built and the frescoes were painted in order to carry out this ritual, or if the ritual was unintended during the chapel’s construction and decoration.
The debate on the context of graffiti continues in these articles; Fleming continues to show how graffiti was accepted and not thought as different from any other form of writing, Gordon shows how the anonymity of graffiti led to an aggressive interpretation, leading to its illicit nature, and Sarti attempted to use binary oppositions to define graffiti relative to formal inscriptions, and proved that a straightforward comparison cannot be made.