{"title":"Ambient Media and Chaucer’s House of Fame","authors":"Ingrid L. Nelson","doi":"10.1353/elh.2021.0021","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the thirteenth century, a theory of media arises from a new science of sense perception that understands natural elements like air and water as media. Geoffrey Chaucer takes up this theory in his poem The House of Fame to suggest a homology between environmental media and the aesthetic media that transmit words and images: a brass tablet, a rock made of ice, the glass of painted windows. Like these surfaces, both the narrator’s body and certain natural elements mediate content, implicitly creating a medieval media theory that unites scientific and communicative concepts of media to theorize the work of art as a production of perceptual mediation. This premodern media theory refutes media histories, both progressive and archaeological, that figure the Middle Ages as static or latent, and anticipates newer theories of ambient, distributed media networks.","PeriodicalId":46490,"journal":{"name":"ELH","volume":"84 1","pages":"551 - 578"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ELH","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2021.0021","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:In the thirteenth century, a theory of media arises from a new science of sense perception that understands natural elements like air and water as media. Geoffrey Chaucer takes up this theory in his poem The House of Fame to suggest a homology between environmental media and the aesthetic media that transmit words and images: a brass tablet, a rock made of ice, the glass of painted windows. Like these surfaces, both the narrator’s body and certain natural elements mediate content, implicitly creating a medieval media theory that unites scientific and communicative concepts of media to theorize the work of art as a production of perceptual mediation. This premodern media theory refutes media histories, both progressive and archaeological, that figure the Middle Ages as static or latent, and anticipates newer theories of ambient, distributed media networks.
摘要:13世纪,将空气、水等自然元素理解为媒介的一门新的感官知觉科学产生了媒介理论。Geoffrey Chaucer在他的诗《The House of Fame》中采用了这一理论,暗示环境媒介和传播文字和图像的美学媒介之间的同源性:一块铜板,一块冰做的石头,彩绘窗户的玻璃。就像这些表面一样,叙述者的身体和某些自然元素都调解了内容,隐含地创造了一种中世纪媒体理论,它将媒体的科学和传播概念结合起来,将艺术作品理论化为感知中介的产物。这种前现代媒体理论驳斥了将中世纪视为静态或潜在的进步和考古媒体史,并预测了环境分布式媒体网络的新理论。