UNDERST ANDING THE FUNCTION of media in the early Middle Ages remains a work in progress. While media as a critical approach has much to offer early medieval studies, and with a small (but growing) list of exceptions from recent medieval scholarship notwithstanding, the history, study, and theory of media remains largely conceived of as a discipline of modernity. Media studies today intersect both with theoretical aspects of new materialism, and the cyborg-manifest, techno-culture of the posthuman (i.e., what, following the social notions of Bruno Latour, may be considered the material ecologisation of humanity outside traditional definitions of the ‘human’). Medieval humanity is similarly defined through complex transactions of the material, technological, and ideological practices; this (post)humanity is in part defined by the way, as corporeal entities, medieval bodies also function as media, not as senders or receivers, but as a medium for information and communication within the ecology of premodern media discourse.

In times of cultural disruption or social breakdown, early medieval bodies operate as physically hybrid media, and as informational focal points for crises of numerous kinds – criminal, moral, national, salvific – in order to highlight these crises and then propose some form of ideological and practical correction. In early medieval England, literary, legal, and historical texts highlight the cultural significance of bodies qua media: the mounting of Grendel's arm in the Old English epic Beowulf, hagiographic accounts of the martyrdom of King Edmund by Viking invaders in 869, and the spiritual and juridical fragmentation of bodies in tenth- and eleventh-century excommunication formulae and law codes. The violence done to these bodies is more than an individual physical act, and also more than just symbolic or prosthetic moments rhetorically appropriating and extending the body as a textual trope. Such moments of somatic violence reveal the medieval body to be a material node in a social network of secular, spiritual, and juridical representations preoccupied with relationships between bodies, body parts, money, worship, words, and information; to employ Armand Mattelart's term, a constellation of communicational practices.

In Mattelart's formulation, information and the media technologies which carry it must be considered together with cultural practices that share their circulatory qualities, and the line between media and anything else that moves across or through a social landscape remains indistinct.