简介

"Medieval Remediation" The phenomenon of what media theorists call remediation is as least as old as the shift from speech to writing, from scroll to codex, and from one language to another. In Dante's time engagement with literature was being transformed by the use of paper instead of parchment and by widespread translation of Latin texts into local vernaculars. With the adoption of new media comes an awareness of the ephemeral nature of all material supports and of what gets lost (as in translation) in the substitution of one for another. Dante’s considerations of the materiality of the medium of sound—from infernal examples of involuntarily excreted words and human speech metamorphosed into inhuman noise to the musical passages of the Purgatorio and Paradiso—are connected with poignant concerns about the contingent life of the vernacular: inevitably entwined, as it is, in a relentless process of re-mediation.