Thanks to the movie Robin Hood and a book about Marco Polo, I've been thinking a lot about medieval media. How did people communicate in the days before the printing press? How much did they know about what was going on in the wider world ?
There's a scene in Robin Hood (warning : the French are the bad guys) in which a spy attaches a message to the leg of a carrier pigeon. P-mail? In an age where many people were illiterate, the ability to read and write must have conferred great power.
The church realised this, of course - and monasteries were renowned for their fantastic libraries. Monks would borrow books and copy them by hand in order to transmit their contents. The Benedictine order was one of the first to lend books to exterior households. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo also passed on his knowledge of faraway lands through books - although he dictated his tales. The thing that strikes me most when reading him is the medieval conception of time. Nobody was in a hurry. Polo's voyages lasted for decades. A brief stopover in a country lasted a year. Lunch probably took a month.
Of course, most news was passed on verbally, by the crier in the town square - or by gossip in the tavern. Communities were actual rather than virtual. Hence the 14th century word communication, from the Latin communicationem: to share and to inform, but also to join and unite.
