Ambient Media and Chaucer’s House of Fame

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.