TY - JOUR AU - Johnson, Ian AB - Different disciplines ‘do’ intermediality through their own specific take on what media are and how they work. Intermedial research has certainly thriven in recent decades, but it has done so in a creatively disorganized fashion, with considerable inconsistencies in its underpinning premises, in its philosophical methods and in its use of terminology. It certainly does not help, for example, that, depending upon one’s perspective, a book, writing, literature and an individual text, despite their different cultural roles, have each been labelled as a ‘medium’. For some, a medium is a channel of communication like telephony; for others, very differently, it assumes the material form of a mobile phone, or, then again, it might be the company providing the service. At times, intermediality also finds itself tangled up with the notion of mediation. Mediation, however, is a broad concept, with a range of meanings beyond that of the relationship between different modes of aesthetic/semiotic expression and communication. For example, humans have to mediate their experience through their senses. Mediation is also a form of cultural negotiation between actors – and this will often involve media. Media and mediality also have a rather untidy though productive relationship with discourse and genre. Discourse encompasses language in its written and oral manifestations and the modalities of thought that go with them, and is therefore implicated in different media involving language. Genre is a category or style such as tragedy, comedy, romance or fantasy. The same genre, or hybrids thereof, may be articulated in several different media. Despite such conceptual and terminological untidiness, a good number of important terms concerning intermediality have nevertheless tended to maintain reasonable stability in their meanings. ‘Mediality’, for example, enjoys a greater uniformity of usage than ‘medium’. It denotes the qualities and powers that individual media do and do not share. By analogy, mediality is to medium as textuality is to text, langue is to parole, repertoire is to performance and competence is to utterance. The workings of mediality are thus realized in the products of individual media. ‘Intermediality’, derived and expanded from the notion of intertextuality, is commonly understood to be what systemically enables the dialogic engagement of different media with each other, whereas ‘multimediality’ generally entails various media operating together to do intermedial work. ‘Transmediality’ (a subcategory of intermediality) occurs when the product of one medium is adapted as the product of another medium – as, for example, when Pre-Raphaelites like Millais or Waterhouse take oil colours to Shakespeare’s Ophelia or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, or when Lara Croft leaps from video game to film. For all the relative stability of these definitions, usage can vary from discipline to discipline, and each discipline tends to stick to its own particular approaches. Some approaches, for instance, prioritize the various materialities of media; some concern themselves more with the natures of signifying systems; others find an interest in the ways in which media may compete with each other.1 Most notably at the current time, fascinating attention continues to be devoted to the implications of modern technologies for understanding intermediality, and in particular the relationships between analogue and digital media.2 All these approaches, however, have had to negotiate the ways in which their particular methodology combines synchronic and diachronic considerations in tackling their primary materials. Although the vast bulk of research on intermediality tends to concentrate on media products and attends sensitively to the synchronic logistics of media-combining of the last one hundred years, with a focus largely on examples from recent and contemporary decades, critical publications in this field often display an awareness nevertheless of the historical contexts influencing medial continuity and change. Take important factors affecting adaptation (for example, the impact of the Vietnam War on the adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness in the Hollywood film Apocalypse Now); the genealogy of new medial combinations (for example, the influence of the typical magazine page upon the visual arrangement of a page on a website); paragone-like competitions between media for cultural primacy (for example, between films and video games as seen every day); or the reaction of older media to younger ones (such as photorealistic printing to photography):3 these categories demonstrate the inalienably temporal aspect and historical boundedness of intermediality in its impacts on all media. This intermedial boundedness can encompass actions of the human body, such as speaking or singing; it can also be generically qualified, such as literature, sculpture or advertising, or technical and material, as in the configuration of a sheet of parchment or a computer screen.4 Academics have been ready to discuss the significant historical forces and influences on new medial production where these act intramedially (that is, within a single form such as in music when one composer influences another), or intermedially (as when a well-known quotation and visual art come together in an advertising poster) or transmedially (as when cinema and the novel interact in yet another adaptation of Jane Austen). And when one medium makes reference to another medium by attempting to imitate it, such as when a poem ekphrastically attempts to re-embody in linguistic form a painting, that too sets up a renegotiation of historical relations that is part of the meaning and significance of what intermedial research should be endeavouring to investigate more fully than it has done to date. It is time, then, that academic studies of intermediality confront their positivist assumptions and valorization of contemporary frames of reference. Intermediality and multimediality are not intrinsically modern and have always been with us. A panoply of late medieval and early modern media, some familiar to the modern eye and others looking very strange, were, after all, precursors of media with which we live today. The historical particularities of the ways in which late medieval and early modern intermedialities worked are not only interesting in their own right but also provoke interesting comparisons with their modern counterparts. For example, intermedial conglomeration, concentration and convergence,5 as pursued by the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google, are no modern-day invention; they were, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in Europe and its empires, all the domain of the Catholic Church. The Church’s multi-medial grasp engaged and disciplined, within a very extensive and capacious reach, not only the obedient faithful but also the body politic and the commanding heights of the educational system. Moreover, ecclesiastical patronage controlled a plethora of artistic productions for very diverse audiences. The four articles on late medieval and early modern intermedialities and multimedialities in Western Christendom presented in this inaugural FMLS Talking Point offer a first concerted conversation concerning intermediality’s necessary historical reframing in the light of the diversity and complexity of late medieval and early modern practice. The articles derive from an international colloquium hosted by Ghent University at the City Museum, Ghent (Gent Stadsmuseum), on 1–2 June 2017, as part of the ongoing programme of activities under the umbrella of the European Union-funded COST Action IS1301, New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, which ran from September 2013 to September 2017.6 This COST Action involved over 300 researchers from 24 countries. Its remit was to re-examine and open up dialogues about the traditional religious, cultural, social, linguistic and geographical rifts and connections of late medieval and early modern Europe, as well as the common national narratives that have influenced and distorted (and continue to influence and distort) the construction and maintenance of historical identities and beliefs. The articles in this Talking Point therefore develop the philosophy and approach of the COST Action by modifying and adding to existing scholarship and debate (or the lack of it) on religious change in the late medieval and early modern periods. The Action’s ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ spells out its view of this age as ‘a period in which the simultaneous presence of tradition and innovation and old and new media and modes of communication offered multiple and divergent options for the formation of religious and cultural identities’.7 Such options involved in medial change constitute much of the focus of the essays in this collection. The Ghent meeting had the aim of bringing late medieval and early modern specialists together to demonstrate that the combination and interaction of various media were not only responsible for the wide dissemination of opinions and ideas, but also had an impact on how these opinions and ideas were interpreted by the many audiences for these media. Thus, intermedial forms and practices shaped new communities of interpretation. This they did not only from the invention of printing up until the mid-seventeenth century, but also beforehand, as Marco Mostert’s inclusion of late medieval saints’ cults in this collection demonstrates. During the long sixteenth century in particular, a media revolution took place that offered unprecedented possibilities for adopting, expressing and exchanging ideas and opinions, often of a religious nature. Many studies have revealed the importance of media such as script, print, images, theatre, songs, ritual, preaching and rumour – and of their combination – in this and the late medieval period. However, due in no small part to the secular disciplining of academic study and its instutionalization, we still fail to grasp adequately the ways in which these media worked together. A richer understanding of how different media functioned interactively in specific settings during the late medieval and early modern periods is therefore of paramount interest. The meeting in Ghent accordingly explored aspects of communication at this time by focusing on the micro-level of specific multimedial events (or series of events) that took place in urban settings, such as civic festivals, religious ceremonies, public sermons, urban revolts, executions of heretics and book burnings. This workshop’s presupposition was that the combination and interaction of various media were not only responsible for the wide and varied dissemination of opinions and ideas, but also had an impact on how these opinions and ideas were interpreted by various media consumers, and thus shaped new communities of interpretation.8 The quartet of articles presented in this Talking Point exhibits a sample of the energy, character and variety of the multimedial and intermedial communication of this period. As we shall see, nowhere was this energy and variety exhibited more extensively and significantly than in the case of the Church. God’s intermedialities: The Book of Books and the Book of Creation The Church’s power, more than that of any modern corporation, encompassed in late medieval and early modern times the means of production, transmission, reception and interpretation of single-medium and multimedia products. When it comes to the Scriptures, the energizing and disciplinary nature of this reach is, without doubt, particularly noticeable for all sectors of society, including the minority of literate elites. At this time, the Bible provided constant occasion across all media for the reinvention of its authoritative subject matter – be it linguistically, visually or orally. From painting to poetry, from manuscript illumination to church architecture, from music to mystery plays, from texts of the liturgy to exercises of meditation upon the life of Christ, these media kept permanent company with each other. Scriptural text met scriptural image, for example in illustrated codices, and in Church services biblical music met biblical language within the already-intermedial and scripturally inflected setting of ecclesiastical architecture. The Book of Books saturated all media, but there was another book of transcendent authority written by God, the Book of Creation (or Book of Nature), which provided its own originary occasion for ceaseless intermediality. In nature, the Almighty granted signifying potential to all created things, which emanate purposefully, as do the words of Holy Scripture, from the mind of the Divinity. In medieval and early modern tradition, words signified things, and things signified other things.9 Nothing in Creation was meaningless, and therefore no created thing was without its own particular potential for mediality. Sometimes a worm signified Satan; sometimes it might represent Christ (Psalm 22.6). Sometimes, however, prophetic only of Freud’s cigar, a worm was just a worm. The Book of Books and the Book of Nature were believed to contain such superabundance of divine meaning and teaching that they were, in many instances, deemed to be beyond the earthbound capacity of human hermeneutics to articulate accurately. The human mind, trapped as it was within its own mortal materiality and the five limited senses through which all experience was required to be processed, could not be expected to understand divine incorporeal wisdom. Hampered by its own fallen and all-too-bodily powers, humanity therefore had to fall back on imagination, an emotionally freighted faculty governed by the will, which could be led dangerously astray by wayward desires that reason could not guarantee to control.10 A properly regulated imagination was regarded, therefore, as vitally necessary and profitable for managing a humble and self-aware soul towards spiritual edification and divine wisdom.11 Disciplined emotions, answerable to and guided by the doctrines and by the supervising clergy of Holy Church, were held not only to be able to move the Christian towards God in regenerative piety, but even to be able to bridge, albeit imperfectly, the absolute ontological and medial barrier between the discourses and modalities of the earthly and those of the heavenly. Thus, the theological virtue and emotion of hope was believed to provide a genuinely experiential foretaste of heavenly happiness itself. More intensely, the human love for God, rising towards the Divinity, might then be reciprocated by God answering humankind across the intermedial divide through palpable stirrings of heavenly feelings and, in souls permitted to receive them, divinely disclosed revelations and visions. On occasion, through special grace, the human subject, otherwise imprisoned in a material body tied to earthly medialities, might even be granted the spiritual privilege of becoming self-annihilated in mystical union with the divinity, beyond and above the carnal senses and the medialities that went with them, having crossed the ultimate boundary between corporeal and divine discourse. God, it was held, graciously licensed imperfect human imaginings of heavenly beings in various media. This permitted and enabled the minds of the faithful to conceive of celestial life through visual and linguistic representations – which, being based on human sense experience, are unavoidably but excusably to some degree misrepresentations. Such imagining of transcendent phenomena was permitted provisionally as a means of stirring devotion, but only for as long as what the human mind was allowed to conjure up materially was not asserted to be real in terms of the fleshly imagination.12 The vast majority of souls was not expected to engage in the transcendental athletics practised by mystics. Though ordinary Christians knew that their salvation never depended on such feats, they were nevertheless expected to marshal a range of emotions productively and in good order to help them move from their imperfect understanding of the divinity and from their wilfully benighted sinfulness to penitential self-awareness, to obediently consenting love and to hope of heaven. It is precisely these kinds of well-coached pious affects that the Milanese celebrations of 1622 were designed to arouse and inculcate by formatively engaging a full range of senses and emotions, as Erminia Ardissino so copiously shows throughout her study of the extraordinary events attending on the twin canonizations of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. Ecclesiastical multimediality: an environment of signs It made complete sense for an organization like the Church with universalizing claims to manage its authority over its agents and many clienteles through a universality of institutionalized media. The canonization celebrations of the two Jesuit saints accordingly immersed the citizenry of Milan in a wrap-around multiplicity of signs stemming from a full range of media variously engaging all the senses. The breathtaking staging of the spectacles of 1622 brought light, sound, scale, narrativity, drama and action to the Roman Catholic Church’s Jesuitically hegemonic strategy of multimedial and intermedial communication. This strategy, articulated through the rituals accompanying canonization, necessitated the gigantic micro-organized deployment of a diverse wealth of signs in an exhilarating and totalizing representation and placement of the providential mission of the Jesuit saints at the commanding heights of the cultural and religious life of Milanese (and by extension all Christian) society. This exercise, simultaneously valorizing ideal relationships between not only the public and the Church but also the human and the divine, seems to have met with no little success in modelling the paradigmatic experiences and identity of a compliantly enthusiastic ecclesiastical and lay community. Such exertions of ideological excitation and control were coordinated not only to form religious habitūs but also identities – both at a collectively public level and at a more private level of individuals experiencing the events according to their own psychological dispositions and educational capabilities and/or experience.13 In a rather different but related context, something comparable may also have been at work in civic early modernity in the Low Countries, as discussed in Eva Janssens’s essay, which shows Protestant identities being constructed intermedially, not this time through totalizing spectacle, but instead through the sharply managed intermedial device of the polemical broadsheet. Another comparable yet fascinatingly different case is discussed in Dalia Stančiene’s article on Lithuania. An ecclesiastical strategy of identity formation determined the way in which vernacular religious consciousness was invented through catechization in the Lithuanian language, and then institutionalized and repurposed with the transfer of the discourse of sermons in the native tongue into new medial domains of politics and law. And in Marco Mostert’s study of how ordinary people used objects and relics in their devotion to the saints, we see how the laity in their everyday existences found and articulated their personal spiritual identities, constructing and conducting their lives under the guidance of their deeply personal relationships with saints, always mindful of the holy narratives that time and time again they could devoutly revisit through vividly re-liveable interior association with such holy objects and relics. As it is a central ‘point’ of this Talking Point to draw attention to the vital historical particulars of late medieval and early modern intermedialities and multimedialities, I shall now look at some significant instances in the studies of our four contributors. Each instance underscores the historical distinctiveness of the workings of medialities at this time. Some of these cases disclose findings very different to those routinely unearthed by intermedial studies of recent and current times; some, however, look enticingly familiar, despite their ideological alterity and distance from the present. Let us start by examining the intermedial particularities of the Milanese experience during the celebrations of 1622. At the heart of the monumental sermons preached at the climax of the events by both the Theatine Paolo Aresi, Bishop of Tortona, and the illustrious preacher Ascanio Ordei, were highly visual comparisons of the canonized saints to the sun and moon. These comparisons, fashioned after a contemporary Baroque taste for metaphorically pictorial eloquence, were influenced by the intermedial authority of emblem books. Whatever visually ingenious and ekphrastic techniques any text of any age may deploy, its appeal to the phenomenology of sight and the epistemology of the visible can only ever proceed intramedially and intracompositionally on a linguistic basis via the mind’s eye rather than from seeing something in real life. Nevertheless, when visuality is incorporated into textual mediality, textuality develops, on its own terms, an indubitably intermedial relationship with visual media that it could otherwise not enjoy. In Milan in 1622, intermedial complementarity of language and visuality was effected not just internally within the sermon by the use of emblematic metaphor, but also externally by the sermon actually being preached near to decorative imagery of the sun and moon that were central motifs of the multimedial environment of the celebrations. The preachers’ text-vision comparisons of Ignatius and Francis with the sun and moon within their sermons were counterpointed and enhanced further in the preachers’ immediate environment by the spectacularly visible text-vision intermediality of solar and lunar artwork being glossed and valorized by inscriptions. How fitting it was, then, that in opting for the sun and moon as explanatory metaphors for their sermonizing, Aresi and Ordei chose symbols that were originary emblems of visuality. The sun, by providing light, makes vision possible. Without it, there would be no visual media. Our preachers could only gain in symbolic capital by alighting on and deploying the most archetypal natural imagery underlying the very rhetoric of the visible and of illumination itself. The gap between the celestial metaphorical signifiers and the saints they signified was also bridged by the ultimate authority of Scripture, when biblical quotations about the sun and moon were applied both in the preachers’ sermons and on architectural buildings glorifying them. Not only did the sun and moon bear significant power by virtue of possessing meaning thanks to their own properties and significations in the Book of Nature, but they also could be believed to give all the more illumination thanks to authoritative biblical texts and the preachers’ expositions thereof being applied to the canonized saints, on whom their eloquently performed scriptural expositions of meaning and teaching intermedially shone. Metaphorical significations, however, did not rely solely on the Bible in order to carry hermeneutic or rhetorical authority. In this somewhat Neoplatonizing age, images and conceits, by virtue of being able to be articulated, carried greater rhetorical and truth-bearing force than imagery customarily came to bear in subsequent centuries. After all, in this period, inventio meant ‘discovery’ rather than ‘invention’, so images were found rather than simply made up. In other words, to find an image for something was to find a signifier which came with its own actual or potential claims on truth or valid argument: something found may be something that really is ‘there’.14 In the late medieval and early modern encyclopaedic universe of discoverable Platonic concordances, connective tissue amongst symbolic networks spanned all media, proliferating as it did so. By virtue of being possible, such metaphorical connections presented themselves as having a self-proving medial force, and they accordingly gave various media interesting work to do. This was especially so when media and imagery were powered by systematic doctrine, exegetical tradition and a teleological metanarrative of providential history from Creation to the Last Judgement that distributed itself authoritatively and in a coordinated fashion throughout and amongst all conceivable media commissioned, patronized and regulated by the Church. In this period, the Church’s project of multimedial conglomeration, concentration and convergence reached levels of cultural power and saturation of which any twenty-first-century multinational media corporation or state-controlled media machine would be seethingly jealous. Such frequent crossing of intermedial borders should not, however, necessarily be taken as a sign that the late medieval and early modern period regarded individual media as essentially porous and thereby lacking in medium specificity. On the contrary, the ability to leap with semiotic and ideological conviction and surety over a border or to move from one specific modality to another could be taken as a demonstration of power and truthfulness. Indeed, the power to move something significant from one relatively autonomous medial zone to another may even have provoked wonder. But what, a modern consciousness might ask, was wonder actually for at this time, and what were its medial logistics and consequences? In the medieval and early modern period, when miracles and transcendent experiences were a key part of cultural tradition, religiously affective wonder had its own medial purposes and manifestations. Whatever modalities and senses it may challenge, wonder frustrates normal cognition because it overloads receiving minds with interpretative and emotional excess that challenges intuition itself. Things passing understanding, however, may prompt (and may be culturally confected in textual and visual art in order to provoke) a response of faith. This is especially so if the receiving subject, as a pious layperson or cleric anxious for salvation, is favourably disposed to the institution wielding and bestowing the wonders mediated to the confused but not confounded carnal senses, cognition and imagination of the well-prepared believer. The counterintuitive breaching of normally constituted boundaries, let it not be forgotten, was in this period at the heart of Christian theology, instantiated par excellence in the Incarnation, in which the divine incorporeal discourse of the Word becomes, for human benefit, the corporeally non-discursive flesh. A different but related breaching of normal medial order occurs in the ontologically realist semiotics of the Eucharist. Here, again for human benefit, in the Real Presence, a material signifier, the signum efficiens of the Host, brings into being through grace that which it signifies: wine becomes blood and bread becomes flesh, in a transgression of ontological boundaries otherwise medially impossible. Medieval and early modern sacred intermediality was subject to further wondrous incommensurabilities which required contemporary culture to resolve them by confecting authorized remedies and narratives not only amongst theologians but more practically amongst ordinary people in everyday religious life. To overcome the shortcomings of human discourse in its imperfect material grasp of things divine, a self-aware discipline, as we have discussed earlier, of devout imagination and meditation was deployed. It was also believed that although the human mind could not understand the mysteries of the divine by its own unaided reason, it could turn to faith and to emotions and senses piously engaged in an affective rather than rationalistic approach to religious experience and the Almighty. It was therefore distinctive of late medieval and early modern Catholic culture for the senses to lead the way in pursuit of the spiritual. Ardissino, in her article in this Talking Point, is therefore correct to use the term ‘sensory education’ – the stirring of the emotionally invested imagination and will of the well-taught Catholic in an appropriately godward direction – all of course in accordance with orthodox doctrine in identity-forming and identity-regulating obedience to ecclesiastical authority. Likewise, well-regulated Christians, both in their inward and outward lives, were meant to be able to channel their emotions, their interiorities and their conduct into imitation of Christ, the Virgin and the saints. This imitation entailed an important degree of self-narrativization, which, in involving bodily conduct in the outer world and a full range of albeit-imagined senses within the mind, called upon and exercised its own kind of intermediality and multimediality. The unique textual properties of the saints and the intermedial redistribution of cognition and narrative among their holy objects Narrative is an extraordinarily portable cultural mode that has always been able to distribute itself productively amongst media. In the late medieval and early modern period, not only narratives but also knowledge about the saints and the human practices devoted to them were abundantly multimedial. Examination of the socially transactional links amongst the different medial representations of, and communications with, saints, with regard to both reception and production, allows us better to understand how intermediality worked at this time. The logistical varieties of the acculturated workings of the saints are exemplified beautifully in Marco Mostert’s essay on the relationships between textually derived narratives about saints and the images and objects characterizing their cults. Late medieval and early modern society was thus as hagiographical as it was multimedial: a profusion of different media and material objects serviced the cults of saints. Each medium bearing knowledge about saints (and sometimes also used to communicate with them) was, in all its specificity, subject to the influence of other hagiographically saturated media. Each medium functioned, often zealously, by faithfully recycling, in its own specific way, transmedial narratives about saints – whether or not a particular narrative’s origins and the means of transmission thus far were aural, oral, visual or textual. In his arresting enquiry, Mostert contends that such narrative recycling was a property par excellence of the ritual object, from the most powerful relics to the cheapest of pilgrim badges. Such ritual objects helped to preserve knowledge about saints by intermedially redistributing their biographies, be these simple key moments of their lives or more elaborate stories. This intermedial ecology of narrative therefore helped to fix and recirculate knowledge of, and devotion to, the saints in the memories and affective practices of believers. In turn, such intermedial redistributions of hagiographical knowledge and imagination also helped to preserve, albeit at different medial removes in diverse combinations, the textual authority of hagiographical narratives. Such (re)distributed (re)cognition thereby helped to make eloquent connections with the living presences of these narratives’ main actants, the interceding saints. Modern literary criticism generally forgets that saints were more than mere, or idealized, characters in a story. From their own celestial purview, saints were and, for modern Catholics in particular, still are very much alive and active. They continued to watch, inspire, love and assist their devotees on earth and even in Purgatory. As intermediaries interceding for those petitioning for their care, they also negotiated another medial boundary, namely the formidable discursive barrier between humanity and a grace-bestowing divinity. In similar vein, relics are intermedially fascinating in their own right. The materiality of relics is multisensory: they may be touched, held, seen, kissed, smelt or even wept upon. The relic is a body part or item associated with a holy person, and invested with the power to occasion communication through grace with an interceding or miracle-working saint. The relic is also a medium prompting, from the human side, petition and prayer, which may be answered from the heavenly realm of saints with a miracle, such as when a particular petition is granted or when a helper-saint cures sickness or rescues a devotee from an everyday plight or greater peril. The intermediality of relics across boundaries between the divine and the human is logistically different, however, from the sacramental intermediality of the Eucharist, which brings that which it signifies into being across the same divide, although it could be said that the saint’s relic is endowed comparably with a measure of its own remote efficient causality because it has the potential to evoke after its own fashion the presence of its saint. Saints were the most important audience for the retellings of their own hagiography. After all, they were regarded as alive enough in heaven to continue to work miracles in the here and now – as recorded in documents from Delft witnessing to nine miracles in the city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – to which Marco Mostert draws our attention in his article in this Talking Point. Hagiography enjoyed a medially complex economy of production, authorization and reception unique in late medieval and early modern textual culture (and perhaps the culture of any age). Saints were the authors of the events of their self-scripted stories and were therefore the chief causes of the narrative. In what other genre – or signifying system – would one and the same person feature as the chief character, the subject matter, the initiating author and the prime, ultimate and most important addressee? The determining fact that one person, the saint, was semiotically in the pragmatic position of being able to occupy several otherwise incompatible sites and to transcend various medial boundaries within a single narrative economy meant that saints enjoyed a singular repertoire of cultural power and penetration. Moreover, hagiography was an astonishingly portable asset for redistributing cognition and symbolic capital throughout late medieval and early modern times. It took colossal and unprecedented advantage of its uniquely creative intermedial potential. The key talking point of the example of hagiography is to suggest that the saints at this time exercised their own form of archi-intermediality. Broadsheets and an intermedial society: contexts and competences Intermedial relationships tend to happen for strategic historical reasons. When media converge, they invariably do so in order to service a specific interest or a particular ideology. When multimedial phenomena redistribute cognition, they generally elicit from their users a ductus (‘some guiding movement within and through a work’s various parts’) in pursuit of an agenda.15 This ductus accordingly informs the intermedial work that multimedial phenomena perform. No agenda, however, can be satisfied without a sufficiently operative degree of competence in either the producers or the users of media products. Competence in a range of textual and visual media was particularly necessary for both the producers and the interpreters of early modern broadsheets. In her telling and extraordinarily rich account of the workings of early Protestant broadsheets in the Low Countries, Eva Janssens’s conception of a multimedial society gains particular traction from the compelling fact that, despite their textual content, these ingenious prints did not always provide within themselves an explanation of their imagery sufficient to communicate their layers of fuller referential understanding. They evidently relied on such explanatory information coming from people adept in their interpretation, including the requisite comparative knowledge of other media or genres, such as preaching, biblical commentary, political satire or polemic. The sharing of information known to some but not to others would come through the collective social setting, namely the experience of interactively viewing the print. The assumed availability of explanatory resources from elsewhere – be they to do with iconography or scriptural allusions – suggests powerfully the functioning at this time in the Low Countries of a multimedial society versed in a range of intermedial transactions necessary not only for the effective production, but also for the reception of these prints. Our contributor is therefore correct to claim that ‘an illustrated broadsheet functioned both as a product of, and also as an intelligent agent in, a multimedial society’ (see Janssens’s article in this Talking Point). The intermedial pragmatics of using such prints in a variety of social situations must have helped, through persuasion, emotional engagement and consent, to shape Protestant identities in the Low Countries on a personal and social level. In consequence, the intermedial forces and communities of these broadsheets compare with the Catholic identities fostered so intently by the 1622 celebrations in Milan, despite the considerable differences in the multimedial forms deployed in both cases. To argue for sophisticated intermedial practices at work at the level of public appreciation in this period is also to argue for their operation at the level of seemingly small details of visual representation. We shall now look at a few clinching moments in Janssens’s study demonstrating a suggestive – and peculiarly early modern – intermediality at stake. Die waerachtige ende valsche aenbidder Godts (The true and false worshipper of God) is a revealing example of how a multifaceted intermediality within the broadsheet extended its field of reference beyond itself. This print exhibits a highly developed intermedial complexity in how it provides fruitful occasion for institutions, genres, media, personalities, textual authorities, visual images and scriptural exegetics variously to interact in an educational and polemical repertoire of interpretative and rhetorical possibilities. Even the tiniest of its images rely on a complex web of signification amongst media not exhibited explicitly within the broadsheet itself. For example, the ‘good stork’ upon the roof of the house on the print’s left-hand side (see Figure 4) holds a frog in its mouth, rather than incontinently gobbling it up. This very small item of iconography, however, depends silently for the intermedial invocation of what it means – i.e. virtuous and well-prepared preaching – on a text or texts from elsewhere in the oeuvre of the author of this broadsheet, namely from pamphlets and possibly sermons by Caspar Coolhaes himself. In representing virtuous and well-prepared preaching, the diminutive stork is anything but inconsequential. Although some viewers of this broadsheet may have lacked literacy, they might nevertheless have heard a sermon expounding this very image and hence have recognized its meaning here too. The intermedially adept members of society who produced such broadsheets clearly assumed, or at least hoped for, a sufficient constituency of users in the know, ready and willing to interpret for fellow-viewers, as well as for themselves, what the good stork means. Intriguingly, the linguistic medium of preaching, represented here by a visual image, is not to be decoded by recourse to visual tradition, but rather transmedially from a fittingly preacherly pamphlet (or, conceivably better, a sermon). By appearing in a broadsheet composed by a preacher and drawing heavily on a tradition of preaching, this image of the good stork allusively boasts – including in its position of oversight – an empowering genealogy in terms of form as well as of subject matter. This intermedial genealogy by extension valorizes the entire broadsheet as virtuous preaching in keeping with the virtuous Christian, also depicted on its left-hand side, piously practising every virtue that this broadsheet preaches.16 Furthermore, being visual and not subject to the time-bound linearity of the language in which sermons are written, read and delivered, the stork has the advantage of being understood in a single instant. Another image in a different broadsheet takes its external explanatory information intermedially from polemically slanted exegetical tradition. In Tafereel ofte Proefsteen wie op deze werelt na Gode leven [en] wie datter in verkeertheyt leeft (Scene or touchstone concerning who lives in this world after God and who lives in wrongfulness) (Figure 1), the Pope sits amongst the Seven Hills of Rome inside the mouth of an apocalyptic monster, with a king and a bishop kneeling before him. Clearly, a routine network of biblically based polemic is intermedially at work here. The print’s spanning of the visual and the scriptural extends to the exegetical and political, strategically coordinating discursive genres through different modes and media. The contents of the Hell-mouth are, intermedially enough, a ‘visual footnote in the margin of the image’ (see Janssens’s article in this Talking Point) referring to the Whore of Babylon in Apocalypse 17 as the great city with dominion over the kings of the earth. This visual image is able to allude to a complex authoritative biblical proof-text with impactful instantaneity. It is designed to prompt an intermedial sequence of textual skills and references from informed users in order to render it understandable, either for themselves or for others who may be in their company in front of the broadsheet. Such oral exposition necessarily crosses the print’s medial borders of visuality and textuality by negotiating the different realms of oral/aural narrative, preaching and teaching. For an even more openly satirical example of anti-Catholic polemic, let us now turn to a multimedial spectacle in another print from the Low Countries, the Satirical Print on the Roman Catholic Church of 1605, engraved by Robert de Baudous, as reproduced in Figure 6 (c). This would have invoked for its participants and witnesses a repertoire of sensory impressions and emblematic representations comparable to the Jesuit festivities in Milan. But in this case, for all its pageantry, street life and decorations, and for all its bustling mix of indoor and outdoor scenes, there is a key difference: this teeming and highly populated spectacle is entirely fictional, taking the form of a grotesque panoptic visualization of socio-religious life caricatured in a polemical allegory. In this print, we come across another visual detail amongst many as morally eloquent as the good stork above. In a carnivalesque procession of the vile and vicious, one particularly repulsive human figure is the character whose grotesquely distended nose takes the form of some kind of woodwind instrument. A musical instrument is, of course, a prosthesis and therefore a medium. Here, however, this contrarious instrument lacks decorous and natural mediality by also being an unnatural organ of the body. The boundary abuse between the anatomical and the medial is, in the eyes of this printmaker (and by extension of his viewing audience), a sign of the sinfulness and depravity of the Catholic Church. Music is properly an invisible product, in its natural condition governed by its own quadrivial rules of art. The output here, however, is deviantly visible. A cascade of mucus (a typical symptom of respiratory illness) hangs as a drawn-out mass from the anatomically pathological nose. At this time, it was believed that music, an essentially mathematical form, reflected the divine proportions of the harmony of the heavenly spheres and the rational structures of the cosmos. Instead of our ears enjoying the medially refined ratios and delightful intervals of music, our eyes are assailed with a revolting homogeneity of human fluid emerging without artifice from a monstrous source. One can only imagine in disgust what dissonant noises might accompany the mucus dangling from this orifice-instrument. Music by its very nature dissipates unbounded into the air. Here, on the contrary, the bounded and non-portable mass cannot be shared with the ears of the citizenry, drooping, as it does, no further than a few inches from the bottom of the cavity from which it is excreted. What is more, the bodily positioning, distension, digital manipulation of, and incontinent emission from, this instrument suggest penile masturbation.17 In this woeful instance, however, the instrument is ineptly and abundantly flaccid. This small but grotesque show of medial boundary abuse trumpets this broadsheet’s polemical perspective on how it regarded the Catholic Church as an arch-abuser of moral and holy law to the point of shamelessly parading its own reprehensibility. Lithuania: new medial territories for Christianity In early modern Lithuania, no genre in any medium had more culturally central and self-expanding authority than the sermon. That there was more to preaching in the native Lithuanian (and Samogitian) tongue than its oral and gestural performance is exemplified in Dalia Stančiene’s article, not only by the authoritative compilations of sermons, the Lutheran Wolfenbüttel Postilla and Lutheran Johan Bretke/Jonas Bretkūnas’s Postilla, but also in the transmedial directing, driven by the remarkable figure of Piotr Skarga, of Jesuit sermons and sermonizing into the new arena of parliamentary life and the proposing of laws. First of all, however, account must be taken of the history of religious life in early modern Lithuania. Some regions were not Christianized until the early fifteenth century, with Samogitia being the last region in the whole of Europe to be converted from paganism. The shift from the medium of Latin to that of the native tongue was significant not only amongst Protestants, but also in the established Roman Catholic Church. In the latter, the Jesuits played a significant role in the the vernacular catechization of Samogitia and of other parts of Lithuania. They thereby helped to create a medium that hitherto had not existed. Catechization, of course, was inevitably a multimedial and intermedial business because the liturgy necessarily involved writing, reading, oral performance, physical gesture, music and its own occasions and forms of theatrical staging. Such new manifestations of mediality necessarily enabled and engaged a new community of users. Catechization thus enveloped both the public and the private spheres; it additionally altered the relationship between Latin and the vernacular with regard to their relative authority and their functional status. Lithuanian, as a divinely sanctioned discursive medium, was valorized by biblical translation, vernacular preaching and the liturgy. The religious glorification of the national mother tongue, additionally, had the corollary of boosting national culture and national identity, or in the words of Bretke, ‘the most precious word of God to you is spoken in your pure native tongue’.18 What might have been the significance of Bretke choosing the title Postilla for his collection of sermons? This choice points not only to the biblically originary but also to what was at this time the best manner of scholastic scriptural commentary. Etymologically, Postilla means ‘after them’, deriving from the Latin post (‘after’) + illa (‘these [i.e. these words]’). In the highest tradition of medieval biblical scholarship, a postilla was a type of commentary closely following and continuously expounding the words of the Scriptures. The most famous postillae of the age were the literal and moral ‘postils’ on the entire Bible by the fourteenth-century Franciscan exegete Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270–1349), whose monumental commentaries minutely explicating the literal and moral senses of Holy Scripture took their place for many centuries as standard works of commentary alongside the words of the Bible and the Glossa ordinaria in manuscripts and early prints of the Latin Vulgate.19 Postilla was therefore a high-value and prestigious name for any book to appropriate, with considerable implicit claims to authority. It must not be forgotten that, within a postilla, the entirety of the scriptural text gets to be quoted. In exhaustively glossing Scripture, a postilla therefore contains and exerts a degree of hermeneutic control over virtually every word of the biblical text. Bretke’s title thus invites us to consider that, in constituting a postilla, these sermons may conceivably be claiming in effect to account closely and comprehensively for the entire Bible. The sermons in the Wolfenbüttel Postilla are supplemented by other authoritative texts, rendered into Lithuanian from Greek and Latin patristic and classical sources and added paratextually to the compilation. Supplements typically empower the company they keep; these textual supplements add value and power to the Wolfenbüttel Postilla’s sermons and thereby to Lithuanian vernacular culture, thus inverting the normal hierarchical relations of authority and prestige between sermons in the mother tongue and patristic authors and classical works; between the Lithuanian vernacular and classical languages of Greek and Latin; and between the claims of the Catholic Church and the Protestantism to which the translators, compilers and scribes of the Wolfenbüttel Postilla adhered. To be able to appropriate such glorious figures and their works for textual support was to lend lustre to the main text of the sermons, making them look more like a bona fide work of the same order as the set text of an auctor valorized in a scholarly edition by supportive explanatory texts of a lesser order. By remediating it, however, into new fields of politics and law – activities beyond the norm for preaching and preachers – Skarga, on the Catholic side, took the vernacular Lithuanian sermon into new multimedial territory and made it more powerful. In doing so, he made the decisive strategic move of introducing the medium of the sermon into parliamentary procedures where customarily it would have had no place and no right to be heard. On being published, his parliamentary sermons then advanced into another authoritative genre by becoming an extended political treatise. Skarga was an extraordinary intermedial manipulator of Bourdieusian proportions. Renegotiating the relationship between the political and religious fields, he would have the Jesuit clergy translate their works and their own agency into new genres and media.20 In Milan, the Jesuits’ exercise of religious power took the form of a specially constructed environment of wrap-around multimediality. In Lithuania, by contrast, the Jesuits had a different strategy of shifting medial boundaries in a theocratic remediation of political and legal discourse. In consequence, the exercise of authority and power moved from one discursive genre to others in order to extend the power of the Catholic Church. Skarga was therefore historically important as an agent of new means of transmedial production and transgeneric circulation of power. Just as the Jesuits in Milan in 1622 set up a hegemonic exercise in engineering a festive environment of signs, so here another autarchic Jesuit set about taking preaching beyond itself into other discursive arenas in order to gain political and cultural control. Both examples serve as eloquent reminders that when a discourse moves within or around media or from one medium to another, power and intermedial agents with agendas are always riding on it. Conclusion The main conclusions of each article in this collection connect with each other. The chief theme of Erminia Ardissino’s essay, the universalizing wrap-around hegemonic strategy of the Catholic Church in Milan in 1622, has affiliations with the hagiographic saturation, in Marco Mostert’s study, of a comparably full range of media in the Low Countries. In both situations, multiple media were regulated by orthodox ecclesiastical institutions calling upon transcendental authority to such an extent that both societies provide clear evidence of the importance of late medieval and early modern intermediality in matters of religious culture. Eva Janssens’s article gives extra traction to her own conception of a multimedial society by showing that, because the broadsheets she discusses did not contain within them sufficient explicit information to be understood, it was necessary and customary for people to supply explanations through their own intermedial knowledge and expertise. In the cases of Milan and the Low Countries, then, this Talking Point presents genuinely multimedial societies thriving differently through wide intermedial public engagement. In Dalia Stančiene’s piece, we see intermediality and multimediality at an earlier stage of construction than in the other three studies, putting in the spotlight the pivotal process of vernacular catechization, followed by the tactical advances of the sermon into the legal and political arenas. For all their differences in the local intermedial reach of the Church on a technical level, Lithuania and Milan were, however, subject to a common intermedial denominator of a Jesuit programme of universalizing doctrine. The universalizing environment of Milan in 1622 had a complementarity with the scriptural saturation of all media throughout Europe. Key factors enabling Scripture to enjoy such successfully extensive distribution of intelligence within and across media were not only its ecclesiastically sanctioned transcendent authority but also, this Talking Point contends, its intrinsic narrativity. Narrativity is possibly the most transmedially portable cultural mode, and Scripture offered the added benefit of informing the interlinking intermediality of the narratives that the articles here variously discuss. Some of the examples discussed were also powered by an underpinning providential metanarrative constituting in its own right a reference point for any medial representation. This Talking Point argues that we ignore historicized religious frames for narrativity at our peril. It also insists that the Bible, the Book of Creation and the saints together contributed to the Gesamtkunstwerk not only of God’s books but more importantly of God’s intermediality. One looks in vain for anything in modern times as transmedially powerful as late medieval and early modern Christianity and its doctrinal and scriptural discourses. Neither the secular redemption mythology of Marxism nor the ideology of empirical science (even at its most amelioristic and positivistic) has been able to come anywhere near it. It should not be too much of a surprise that this was so. In as much as ‘[m]edia can be considered “institutions to think with”’, as ‘highly differentiated and widely distributed infrastructures that enable reflection and interaction across space and time’,21 it has to be admitted that the late medieval and early modern Church enjoyed remarkable levels of institutional remediation, articulated everywhere and in every conceivable way from the public, worldly spheres of warfare, politics and law to the interior arenas of the spiritually engaged imaginations of private individuals. This period, it has to be emphasized, saw the mediation of the world as a structuring principle of the human mind itself. By its very nature, the human mind was seen as containing and therefore mediating everything in the world. In the words of Hugh of St Victor: the mind, imprinted with the likeness of all things, is said to be all things and to receive its composition from all things and to contain them not as actual components, or formally, but virtually and potentially. This, then, is that dignity of our nature which all naturally possess in equal measure.22 It is this dignity of our nature that gave medieval and early modern intermediality and multimediality its historically distinctive and creative character. This Talking Point proposes that this character provides invaluable lessons for the study of modern intermediality. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors and contributors would like to thank Ghent City Museum, Ghent University and the COST Association for supporting the meeting from which this collection of articles is derived. They would also like to thank Mary Rigby and Bethany Gaunt for their invaluably expert and generous editorial support during the production of this Talking Point, and Mary Orr and Francesco Manzini for preparing the ground by setting up and developing the idea of the Talking Point as a publishing opportunity for productively bringing together these essays on intermediality and multimediality in Forum for Modern Language Studies. As author of this Introduction, I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Mary Orr, Robin MacKenzie and Francesco Manzini for their extremely generous, perceptive and helpful reading of an earlier draft. Footnotes 1 The generalizations with which this Introduction begins draw passim on the following useful studies: Gabriele Rippl, ‘Introduction’, in Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music, ed. by Gabriele Rippl, Handbooks of English and American Studies, i (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 15–52: online at [last visited 14 December 2020]; Jørgen Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Klaus Bruhn Jensen, ‘Intermediality’, in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, ed. by Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig with Jefferson D. Pooley and Eric W. Rothenbuhler (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2016): [last visited 14 December 2020]; Irina O. Rajewsky ‘Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality’, Intermédialités, 6 (2005); Werner Wolf, ‘(Inter)mediality and the Study of Literature’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 13.3 (2011), [last visited 14 December 2020]. See also the useful and accessible online presentation: Camila Figueiredo, ‘Intermediality’, [last visited 14 December 2020]. 2 For digital intermediality, see Jensen, ‘Intermediality’, pp. 6–7; Jan-Noël Thon, ‘Narratives across Media and the Outlines of a Media-Conscious Narratology’, pp. 522–43, and Britta Neitzel, ‘Performing Games: Intermediality and Videogames’, pp. 689–710, both in Handbook of Intermediality, ed. by Rippl. See also Figueiredo, ‘Intermediality’. 3 On diachronicity, see Rajewsky, ‘Intertextuality, and Remediation’, pp. 46–47, and Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature, pp. 24–27. 4 Bruhn, The Intermediality of Narrative Literature, pp. 19–22; Rippl, ‘Introduction’, in Handbook of Intermediality, ed. by Rippl, pp. 37–38. 5 For an explanation of these concepts, see Jensen, ‘Intermediality’, pp. 8–11. 6 Organizing committee: Samuel Mareel, Bart Ramakers, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Louise Vermeersch; COST Action Working Group coordination: Elise Boillet, Lucie Doležalová, Ian Johnson, Géraldine Veysseyre. 7 ‘Memorandum of Understanding for the implementation of a European Concerted Research Action designated as COST Action: New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ (Brussels: COST Association, 2013), accessible at: [last visited 31 October 2020], p. 5. 8 The two paragraphs preceding this endnote are largely based on the call for papers for this meeting drawn up by Louise Vermeersch and the other members of the local organizing committee, and emended by Erminia Ardissino and Joost Robbe. 9 For medieval thinking about scriptural semiotics and the signifying properties of created things, see Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100 – c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition, ed. by A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, with the assistance of David Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 65–112, 197–276. For an excellent example of a primary text in this tradition, see the guide to knowledge and the reading of the Bible and of Creation by Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. by Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), Records of Western Civilization, especially pp. 121–22 on the signifying properties of things. 10 For a definitive account of medieval understandings of the workings of imagination, including in a theological context, see Alastair Minnis, ‘Medieval Imagination and Memory’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990–2013), II (2005), The Middle Ages, ed. by Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson, pp. 239–74. 11 For studies of the management of devotional interiority that give a good idea of mainstream tradition, see Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 12 For illustration of the theology and semiotics of this, see the passages from Thomas Gallus’s ‘Extraction’ of The Celestial Hierarchy and Robert Grosseteste’s commentary on The Celestial Hierarchy in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Minnis and Scott, pp. 165–96. 13 Medieval usage of the term habitus is rather narrower in scope than its Bourdieusian descendant, tending to focus on how the human mind acquires a well-coached moral condition directively through repeated good actions. For example, Giles of Rome, in his commentary on the Song of Songs, citing Aristotle, declares that goodness is dependent on our actions, ‘for, according to the Philosopher [i.e. Aristotle], we become good because we perform good actions, and like mental conditions (habitūs) are begotten from like actions’. For this, see Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Minnis and Scott, p. 247. However, it would also be true to say that the Bourdieusian understanding of the term has its own applicability to this historical situation, concerned as Bourdieu is with how imitation fosters mental habits, the socialization of individuals, and consequently the formation and functioning of society. 14 Ullrich Langer, ‘Invention’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990–2013), III (1999): The Renaissance, ed. by Glyn P. Norton, pp. 136–44. 15 For ductus, see Mary Carruthers, ‘The Concept of Ductus, or Journeying through a Work of Art’, in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. by Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 190–213, especially the definition of ductus on p. 196: ‘the conduct of a thinking, listening and feeling mind on its way through composition’, and also the following explanation: ‘So, ductus is the way(s) that a composition, realizing the plan(s) set within its arrangements, guides a person to its various goals, both in its parts and overall’ (p. 200). 16 Its visual position is also important in the top left corner as the position of directed reading, but only after the meaning has been decoded. I would like to thank Mary Orr for pointing out this possible ‘reading’, which intermedially applies a ‘textual’ approach to a piece of visual art. 17 I would like to thank Mary Orr for pointing out the onanistic possibilities of this image. 18 Johannes Bretke’s ‘Postilla’: Study, Facsimile and CD [in Lithuanian], ed. by Ona Aleknavičienė (Jono Bretkūno Postilė: Studija, faksimilė ir kompaktinė plokštelė, sud. Ona Aleknavičienė) (Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 2005), p. 971. 19 For further information on Nicholas of Lyra, see The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn, revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 1158; Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Minnis and Scott, pp. 266–76, and Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. by Philip D. W. Krey and Lesley Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000), Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, xc. 20 For recent research, also deriving from the same COST Action, and devoted to issues of religious change in late medieval and early modern times, see the collection of essays edited by Sabrina Corbellini and Sita Steckel in Church History and Religious Culture, 99 (2019): Issue 3–4: Theme Section: The Religious Field during the Long Fifteenth Century, 303–464. 21 Jensen, ‘Intermediality’, p. 8. 22 Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, p. 45. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) TI - INTRODUCTION: HISTORICIZED INTERMEDIALITY AND HISTORICAL VARIATIONS ON INTERMEDIALITY JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqab002 DA - 2021-03-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/introduction-historicized-intermediality-and-historical-variations-on-qEY00kNva8 SP - 1 EP - 1 VL - Advance Article IS - DP - DeepDyve ER -