Abstract
Reading the ars dictaminis as a medieval media theory that carefully accounts for the relationships the epistle generates between the text object and its users, this article examines the human body of the epistolary messenger as a locus of anxiety in both medieval rhetoricians’ theorizations of epistolarity and literary depictions of epistolarity. Letter-writing manuals—such as Guido Faba’s Summa dictaminis (ca. 1228–29), Thomas of Capua’s Ars dictandi (1216–20), and Conrad von Mure’s Summa de arte prosandi (1275–76)—emphasize the status of the letter as a material object, operating among and across human and nonhuman bodies in what is termed here the epistolary circuit. The messenger’s human body is a site of vulnerability to violence, particularly in romances, which often depict the subsumption of individual bodies into the machineries of statecraft. The titular hero of Richard Coer de Lyon (early fourteenth century) kills hostages and turns their bodies into pseudoepistles, parodying the complementary relationship between textual “body” and human body inherent in the epistolary circuit, as established in the reading offered here of the dictaminal treatises.
