UNDERST ANDING THE FUNCTION of media in the early Middle Ages remains a work in progress. While media as a critical approach has much to offer early medieval studies, and with a small (but growing) list of exceptions from recent medieval scholarship notwithstanding, the history, study, and theory of media remains largely conceived of as a discipline of modernity. Media studies today intersect both with theoretical aspects of new materialism, and the cyborg-manifest, techno-culture of the posthuman (i.e., what, following the social notions of Bruno Latour, may be considered the material ecologisation of humanity outside traditional definitions of the ‘human’). Medieval humanity is similarly defined through complex transactions of the material, technological, and ideological practices; this (post)humanity is in part defined by the way, as corporeal entities, medieval bodies also function as media, not as senders or receivers, but as a medium for information and communication within the ecology of premodern media discourse.

In times of cultural disruption or social breakdown, early medieval bodies operate as physically hybrid media, and as informational focal points for crises of numerous kinds – criminal, moral, national, salvific – in order to highlight these crises and then propose some form of ideological and practical correction. In early medieval England, literary, legal, and historical texts highlight the cultural significance of bodies qua media: the mounting of Grendel's arm in the Old English epic Beowulf, hagiographic accounts of the martyrdom of King Edmund by Viking invaders in 869, and the spiritual and juridical fragmentation of bodies in tenth- and eleventh-century excommunication formulae and law codes. The violence done to these bodies is more than an individual physical act, and also more than just symbolic or prosthetic moments rhetorically appropriating and extending the body as a textual trope. Such moments of somatic violence reveal the medieval body to be a material node in a social network of secular, spiritual, and juridical representations preoccupied with relationships between bodies, body parts, money, worship, words, and information; to employ Armand Mattelart's term, a constellation of communicational practices.

In Mattelart's formulation, information and the media technologies which carry it must be considered together with cultural practices that share their circulatory qualities, and the line between media and anything else that moves across or through a social landscape remains indistinct.

Towards the end of Vita Haroldi, the early thirteenth-century (c. 1205) life of King Harold Godwinson composed at Waltham, the author asserts the truth of his account, even though its details may differ from what others have written about Harold:

At first glance, this is an audacious position for the Vita's author to take, given that his own text asserts that Harold in fact did not die on the battlefield at Hastings in 1066, but survived, was healed by a Saracen woman, and then travelled the world before returning to his native England to live out a long life as a holy man, first among the Welsh, and then as a hermit at Chester. Produced at Waltham, an abbey that had Harold as its patron, the Vita has been aptly described as a “secular hagiography”, and much of its narrative is patent invention, flying in the face of all received historical tradition and evidence. It is challenging, therefore, to regard this text as a historical source. In the nineteenth century, E. A. Freeman dismissed the work in frank terms, as “utterly worthless” and “mere romance, food for the comparative mythologist rather than for the historian, and valuable only as illustrating certain … tendencies of the human mind”. While the Vita has been the subject of a small number of studies in the past few decades, it is safe to say that no one considers its biographical details of Harold's life after 1066 as anything approaching a true and factual account.

As the Vita's rhetoric suggests, the historical record of King Harold Godwinson's end in 1066, already a dense skein of textile, text, and image, is further complicated by the twelfth-century rise of legends of Harold's survival. In accounts of Harold's fate, the antagonism evident between these competing traditions has much to tell us about the formative processes of medieval history, and in particular the intertextual strategies which work to ratify one tradition as authentic, and reject the other as fantasy.

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES how media history and the printed book's place within it contribute to the institutional identity of literature, and how the institutional strategies by which these past documents became and maintain their authority as literary artefacts have resulted in various forms of the ‘strategic forgetting and recoding’ that Jane Newman notes in the quotation above. When we started this essay, we chose two disparate literary works from our respective periods of specialisation, Beowulf and Samuel Pepys's Diary, for the simple reason that they both were discovered as written documents, became literature through printed editions and scholarship, and now have innovative electronic resources for their reading and study. What we did not expect were the surprising and complicated homologies of transliteracies, alternative media and their dismediation/dematerialisation that arose between them.

As with literary criticism, the field of media studies frequently has, in Timothy Druckery's words, applied a ‘lazy linearity’ to the historical formation of its subject. For most of their existence, both literary and media studies have espoused an evolutionary model of development, where the technological expressive mechanisms of the present day become a proleptic standard, privileging the lineage of their precursors over other forms of communication and information management that may have existed in the past. In general, literary criticism has a hard time imagining any kind of discursive past outside a logocentric progression of the oral to the written to the printed. Up until a century ago, literature by technological necessity had its material origin as a handwritten text, even if at one point it had been oral. Until very, very recently, to be considered literature a text must have been printed, usually in book form, and often as an edition or in an anthology.