Letter, Word, and Good Messengers: Towards an Archaeology of Remote Communication

Abstract

Some late-medieval illuminations, in which depictions of messengers play an important role, are examined in order to shed light on the images' preoccupation with body and script, and on their attempts at illustrating norms and anxieties regarding messengers and their duties. Cultural production in medieval Europe frequently depicted instances of remote communication and displayed an awareness of its problems and challenges. Distant communication relied on subaltern human agents, who carried written messages and used their own body to store and deliver messages. The pictorial treatments point to a love-hate relationship of the senders/recipients to the messengers as the necessary third party. Beyond control, out of the eyes of the master, every messenger had the potential of endangering the success of the desired communication. Thus, the images highlight the fragility of a communicative situation dependent on human relays.

The piecemeal evolution of writing

“…A clear example of this is a letter that mentions the fact that it is being read aloud by a messenger (a ubiquitous practice, abundantly documented: see e.g. Wearne 2021;Stock 2012). By itself the practice of reading aloud does not mean the messenger is reciting a partly memorised text (although, in a culture otherwise dominated by recitation literacy, that would be likely); but it does mean that the audience gains access to the novel information conveyed by the letter through oral means, not directly through writing.…”