Media Theologies, 1615-1668
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Peters, John
Abstract
The histories of media and Protestant theology are unlikely counterparts. But long before “media” was established as a discipline by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler, the “media concept,” I argue, lay at the heart of the poetry, prose, and theologies of post-Reformation England. Though reformed thinkers famously resisted both the materialism and the institutional hierarchies of Roman Catholicism, their accounts of seemingly unmediated contact with the divine were no less perplexing or physical–such as John Donne’s radically orthodox view of the materiality of heaven, or Thomas Traherne’s praise of fetal life as the mode of unparalleled divine apprehension. Indeed, the spirit-centered ethos of Protestantism is not so starkly anti-material as scholars have previously argued; on the contrary, it demanded ever more subtle approaches to just how believers might traverse the immeasurable gap between themselves and God. Efforts to refine and imagine techniques of communing with God and others through sight, speech, hearing, deafness, writing and other media—things in the middle, as I define it broadly, that have the capacity to both catalyze and thwart human attempts at communication—generated theories of communication at the interstices of theology, poetics, mathematics, and technology. By focusing on moments in poetry, preaching, devotion, and language reform movements in which communication is particularly vexed, this richly entangled history of early English Christianity and media innovation reframes and shifts the usual sites of human power: the mathematical intuitions of a deaf boy over the Royal Society philosopher, the buzzing of a fly in the ear over the praying male voice. “Media Theologies” deliberately courts the counterintuitive and anachronistic affinities between twentieth-century media theory and seventeenth-century theology, arguing that the central terms and concepts of media studies are neither as modern nor as secular as they now appear.
Recommended Citation
Hyun, Trina, "Media Theologies, 1615-1668" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 980.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/980
