The body versus the printing press: Media in the early modern period, mentalities in the reign of castile, and another history of literary forms

Abstract

Going back to a period in History and to a field of communicative phenomena which, through the work of M. McLuhan, had been at the center of Western intellectual discussion during the nineteen sixties and seventies, this article advocates the integration of a new perspective into the praxis of literary history, which, strange as it may seem, has never been the literary historians' concern. For almost two centuries, they have been dedicating their whole attention to semantics and forms of contents, leaving behind — or just ‘looking through’ — the changing media of communication as a constitutive element for the structures, the articulation and the circulation of meaning. A survey of the history of several genres in Castilian literature at the age of the Catholic Kings is developed in order to demonstrate the profound impact which the changing media do not only exercise on meaning and its forms, but also on the functions of communicative processes and on the mentality of those who are involved in them.