The history of literature is closely connected to the history of media. This introductory lecture will survey these interlinked histories, focusing on English literature from the Middle Ages to the present. The concept of ‘media’ applied here will be comprehensive, going beyond communications media and technologies like the book to consider sensory dimensions as well as forms of medialisation and the ‘materialities of communication’. The lecture will range across literary periods and forms, always with an eye to how these forms develop in tandem (or in competition) with changing media constellations, from orality and literacy via manuscript and print to photography, cinema and (still so-called) ‘social media’.