Messengers and messaging in Middle English literature

This dissertation interrogates messengers in Middle English literature as a crucial site for negotiating narrative authority, political legitimacy, and semiotic meaning. Traditionally viewed as passive conveyors of information, medieval messengers instead emerge in these texts as active rhetorical agents who shape, distort, and destabilize communication. Centering on how messengers function within medieval narrative ecosystems, this study demonstrates that they do not merely deliver messages but actively participate in the construction and manipulation of meaning.Drawing on theories of narrative as rhetoric (Phelan) and medieval and contemporary semiotics (Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Barthes, Eco), this project analyzes messenger scenes across a range of Middle English texts, including the alliterative Morte Arthure, Richard Coeur de Lyon, Athelston, and The Canterbury Tales. Through close reading and textual analysis, I argue that messengers act simultaneously as signifiers—through their physical appearance, objects like seals and letters, and performative speech—and as signified figures, whose credibility and authority are interpreted and contested by both characters and audiences. Their failures, distortions, and interventions expose the inherent instability of communication systems and reveal the political, ethical, and social stakes embedded in narrative transmission.