New Approaches to Medieval Communication?1

New Approaches to Medieval Communication?19interested in the message as such. Nor did he devote attention to the process ofcommunication in which the ‘destination’, the person for whom the informationis intended, answers a message and thus becomes a ‘source’, while theoriginal ‘source’ becomes the ‘destination’ of the answer. Many have tinkeredwith Shannon’s elegant model in order to address its limitations. In the “processmodel of communication” of Oomkes, to take a random example, attentionis paid to the contents of messages and the interaction which takes placewhen two human beings communicate. 16 He defines communication as follows:Communication is the exchange of symbolic information which takes place betweenhuman beings who are conscious of one another’s immediate or mediatedpresence. This information is given, received and interpreted partially consciously,partly unconsciously. 17This definition, too, does not seem to be wholly adequate. Although weobtain much information from the unconscious behaviour of the people wemeet, such signals are quite different from consciously encoded messages. Thesender must be conscious that he is providing information before we can speakof communication. An example may explain this. In the Early Middle Ages itwas possible to indicate social status by hair-dress. The long hair of theMerovingian kings signified their royal blood. Those whom one wanted toexclude from royal succession were shorn. Hair-dress could therefore be usedas a ‘medium’ for the transmission of messages. When king Chilperic I wasmurdered at Chelles under mysterious circumstances, his body was recognizedby its copious shock of hair. 18 However, Chilperic was no longer conscious ofthe message he sent: he no longer had the possibility not to send this signal, forinstance by covering up his long hair. A dead man does not himself ‘communicate’.In the study of medieval communication the exchange of consciouslyencoded messages is privileged.The Forms of Medieval CommunicationAny attempt to reduce the fullness of medieval communicative behaviourto a rigid scheme risks to be both banal and soporific. Such a scheme has to16 No. 26 (OOMKES, 1986), p. 32.17No. 26 (OOMKES, 1986), p. 44.18 J.M. WALLACE-HADRILL, The Long-Haired Kings and other Studies in Frankish History(London, 1962), pp. 148-248, esp. pp. 156-158, 162, 232, 245.