Premodern Media and Networks of Transmission in the<i>Man of Law’s Tale</i>

Abstract

This essay argues that the Man of Law’s Tale represents cultural and textual transmission through a network of premodern media: voices, texts, bodies, culture, human actions, and nonhuman forces. This model of transmission is rhizomatic, multivocal, and potentially transgressive, and is a practice distinct from the hegemonic, institutional, and linear trajectories of translatio studii et imperii. Drawing on theories of new media and embodied informatics while also challenging their reliance on machine technologies, this paper shows how premodern media distribute agency in the transmission of knowledge and culture during Constance’s journeys of conversion between Rome, Syria, and England. The Christian culture she transmits flickers from noise to signal, suggesting that medieval cultural mobility is more fluid than the current paradigm of translation suggests. In this context, “mediation” not only expresses the relationship between a human and her machine technology, but is also a condition of life in a culture. The essay also suggests that transmission is a paradigm for the structure and poetic project of The Canterbury Tales.