From Communion to Communication

Satires’ vitriolic nature made them poor tools of propaganda. Rather than as instruments of persuasion, they often read as anxious to foreground their own inflated diffusion, power to provoke, and coherence through retrospective serialization that suggested a fictional continuity. If part publicity stunt, however, these satires also cannily exploited and extended the reformed theological concept of “communication” by which the traditional corporeal understanding of the social body, figured in Communion, was replaced with spiritual connection to Jesus and, ultimately, to fellow worshipers. Satires’ emphasis on foreignness and distance from one’s neighbors in particular facilitated a kind of “stranger sociability” with fellow reformed readers they did not know. This theological origin suggests that the modern public sphere began with the communication of the Mass before it transformed into mass communication.