Materiality and Transcendence

In the Middle Ages material circumstances were crucial for the media forms used for archiving, storage, and transmission: texts, images, and objects were not simply seen as interchangeable information carriers, but as specifically given entities. Similarly, perception and recognition were not viewed as purely abstract processes, but as operations involving interactions between the objects and the mind, which were themselves connected via mediating agencies. In accordance with the Scholastic axiom that there is nothing in the intellect or mind that is not first in the senses (“nihil in intellectu/ mente quod non prius fuit in sensu”), the external senses were regarded as the foundation for all knowledge. Among them, the sense of touch (tactus) was the lowest, but at the same time the most fundamental and intense. On the one hand it was indispensable; on the other hand it relied on the higher senses, which allowed greater proximity to the divine: vision, for example, which was itself conceived as a relation of exchange between the sense of sight, the eye, light, and objects.

In general, processes of transmission and transfer were linked with elements of contact and proximity, even if they took place across large spaces and over long periods of time. The work of the senses was conceived of as that of messengers, taking the data gathered in the outside world into the human interior. The exchange of information was seen as an exchange between individuals, indeed between bodies. The question of whether or not the content of a piece of writing was faithfully reproduced or passed on thus depended largely on those who had possession of it, delivered it, or made it known. The idea that a medium embodies someone who is absent was omnipresent. In Chaucer's account of a dream vision, Hous of Fame, which I will discuss in more detail below, we encounter the notion that every word spoken anywhere is materialized in the House of Fame in the form of the person who spoke it: “That spak the word, that thou wilt gesse | That hit the same body be” (lines 1080f.).