"The back-and-forth form" : epistolarity in late medieval literature

Abstract

The project explores medieval epistolarity as a medium and genre. I examine the body of rhetorical theory that described the purpose and form of the letter, the ars dictaminis. I apply contemporary media theory to medieval definitions of epistolarity, and I assert that we can read these definitions as a medieval media theory. Medieval writers were interested in the way that the letter worked and represented the epistolary circuit in literary texts as an event that draws together bodies in motion. The chapters of my dissertation examine the categories of body and movement instantiated in the epistolary circuit. Chapter 1 examines the role of the seal in hagiographies, arguing that the imagined mechanics of the seal and its relationship to its issuer's human body resonates with the relic, a vestige of a saint's human body that preserves the saint's miraculous, superhuman efficacy across time. Chapter 2 looks at the way the messenger's body is a locus of anxiety for epistolary theorists and medieval authors. The messenger's excessively human faculties emerge as cites of potential failure. Chapter 3 centers the performative elements of the epistolary circuit, arguing that the epistolary present tense is especially momentous. The timing of the epistolary performance, its ability to capture a momentous present tense, received special attention in dramas. Chapter 4 investigates the relationship between the first-person sender or author and the second-person addressee instantiates within the text the circulation of meaning across various embodiments.