Medieval Media - (Middle Ages) by Ingrid Nelson (Hardcover)
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About this item
Highlights
- Traces the development of media concepts across scientific, legal, and devotional knowledge domains to offer a coherent theory of premodern media Were there media before the printing press?
- About the Author: Ingrid Nelson is Associate Professor of English at Amherst College and author of Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
- 276 Pages
- Literary Criticism, Medieval
- Series Name: Middle Ages
Description
Book Synopsis
Traces the development of media concepts across scientific, legal, and devotional knowledge domains to offer a coherent theory of premodern media
Were there media before the printing press? Although medieval culture lacked the machine technologies that we conventionally associate with the idea of media, medieval thinkers developed extensive scientific, legal, and devotional discourses of media and mediation. Ingrid Nelson draws on contemporary media theory to explain how premodern media--including not only easily recognizable media forms like books and paintings but also bodies and environmental elements that mediate perception--served as essential materials of communication between self and world. Tracing the development of medieval media from the rediscovery of Aristotle's work on sense perception to post-Magna Carta legal forms and Christian devotional practice, Medieval Media synthesizes these diffuse discourses to present a coherent theory of premodern media. Turning her focus to literature, Nelson shows how Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales draws on medieval media theory to express an aesthetic materialism that emphasizes relation and network over mimesis and representation. In exploring how literature shapes and is shaped by medieval media, The Canterbury Tales articulates a poetics of media that seeks to unite the perceptual, social, and spiritual capacities of human experience, even as it encodes emerging exclusions and restrictions of bodies marked by race and gender in medieval Western culture. Bringing medieval studies and media studies into conversation with one another, Medieval Media uncovers concepts and theories of premodern media that expand our understanding of media history and open new avenues for medieval literary studies.Review Quotes
"Hugely wide-ranging and very learned, Medieval Media promises to enrich medievalists' understanding of medieval mediations, and also to demonstrate the importance of medieval media forms to scholars working in other periods."-- "Jessica Brantley, author of Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms"
"While attentive to historical difference, Ingrid Nelson demonstrates not only that the Middle Ages had a media theory, but that medieval media share and even anticipate many characteristics of later forms of media. This book is an ambitious act of recovery. It has already changed the way I read Chaucer."-- "Rebecca Davis, University of California, Irvine"
About the Author
Ingrid Nelson is Associate Professor of English at Amherst College and author of Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.Dimensions (Overall): 9.0 Inches (H) x 6.0 Inches (W) x .75 Inches (D)
Weight: 1.2 Pounds
Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up
Number of Pages: 276
Genre: Literary Criticism
Sub-Genre: Medieval
Series Title: Middle Ages
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Format: Hardcover
Author: Ingrid Nelson
Language: English
Street Date: September 16, 2025
TCIN: 93873595
UPC: 9781512828108
Item Number (DPCI): 247-31-3158
Origin: Made in the USA or Imported
Shipping details
Estimated ship dimensions: 0.75 inches length x 6 inches width x 9 inches height
Estimated ship weight: 1.2 pounds
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