AUTHOR COPY Short Essay Embodiment and the human from Dante through tomorrow David Gary Shaw Department of History, Wesleyan University, Connecticut. Abstract Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman matches its rhetoric to its argument by highlighting anxiety in its cybernetic subjects as we face the prospect of disembodied humanity. Medievalists should be sympathetic since embodiment is key to the conception of full medieval personhood. Hayles reacted against a new desire to loosen the link of person to body and much speculative thinking continues to push in this direction. As contemporary science fiction shows, we can conceive a variety of technological advances that might allow intelligence to exist electronically and humans to become increasingly independent of their bodies. While some form of materiality and localized perspective seem necessary, in the future a person will be identified less by materiality or information than by understanding. The ability to recognize a being as a durable, comprehensible interlocutor will be the litmus test of the posthuman being. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 165–172. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.22 Much of N. Katherine Hayles’s prescient and powerful How We Became Posthuman is hedged with anxiety, with psychological tension and with emotional vibrations. Its conclusion (Hayles, 1999, 283–292) sums this up, balancing fear against hope in the face of the imminent posthuman: fear of what people are; fear of what they might become; fear of what we might do with the ideas and with the technology that we now possess or can imagine for the future. The account of many of the scientific visionaries behind the field of cybernetics is shaded by discussions of their own biographies, tales of men, r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 165–172 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/