Challenging Crisis Discourses

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the genre of "crisis discourse" in relation to scribal, print, and digital media in both past and contemporary cultures. Many readers familiar with the early modern emergence of print will doubtless be familiar with similar laments and discourses in that period. (Of course, there is also the problem of teleological accounts that praise printing, another related issue.) Since contemporary rhetoric about the crisis of books in the face of digital media is so prevalent, there is no need to enumerate the instances--but lamentations abound. In terms of contemporary relationships between various media, this is obviously a hot topic, not only among academics (especially in digital humanities) but also in wider popular culture.

Much of my thinking on this issue was sparked a few weeks ago, when I read Ted Striphas's book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia UP, 2009) [read my review here]. Just a few days ago, I encountered further thoughts in Elaine Treharne's excellent blog post on "Restrictive 'Humanities'." The former goes a long way to challenge the rhetoric of catastrophe by thinking instead about the various modes of intermediation in our culture. The latter ranges across several important questions pertaining to digital humanities, at one point arguing that "the [early modern] dawn of print did not displace, and still has not displaced, the manuscript; indeed, the digital age itself has not done so, and, I venture, will never do so." Both scholars raise important points for considering the ongoing developments of text technologies, and both convincingly challenge assumptions that underly the misunderstanding that newer technologies eclipse previous technologies.

My own interest in these issues is especially connected to some recent work I've undertaken in terms of a handwritten prayer in an early modern book. While browsing through Early English Books Online a few months ago, I discovered that the Folger Shakespeare Library holds a copy of the first printed edition of A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the Instruction of a Christen Woman (STC 24856.5), translated by Richard Hyrde from Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae Christianae, which contains a handwritten note including a prayer by a reader with the date 1637 (on page B4v; click to view, though only with institutional access). After some digging, I discovered that it has gone fairly unnoticed in scholarship. So I've undertaken a study of the prayer, which turns out to be an appropriation of biblical texts, mainly from Psalm 89 (90) [here we enter problems of medieval & early modern numbering of the Psalms].

Along with thinking about the handwritten note as a cultural artifact on its own, I also want to use it to consider relationships between scribal, print, and digital media--and how this intermediation matters to scholarship. As a model of intermediation, the associations of scribal and print practices in the handwritten note should be understood as dynamic rather than linear, since scribal and print practices intermingled in the early modern period, just as they continue to intermingle in our present culture. In a parallel fashion, the emergence of digital media does not suppress scribal and print forms but intensifies possibilities for intermedial relationships. Thus, the prayer survives through continued intermediation: for twenty-first-century readers, the most accessible means of reading this prayer, through EEBO, further augments the relationships of early modern media with a digital media interface. It is also important to note that even EEBO is a complicated instance of intermediation: this archive does not provide digital photographic reproductions of printed books but representations of the earlier technology of microfilm. Furthermore, these interconnected representations are, in turn, mediated through a web interface controlled by a gateway with a pay wall.

There's a lot here to think about, and I'm in the early stages of working out my thoughts on the issue. While doing so, I've also been wondering where other scholarship exists that similarly challenges crisis discourses and proposes new ways of thinking about shifts in text technologies. Certainly various pursuits in digital humanities contribute here, whether inherently or more explicitly (I've encountered some, but welcome suggestions). It is my hope that this little-known piece of early modern biblical appropriation will lead me to further considerations about the intermediation at work in everyday culture and intersections with how scholarship deals with it.

Review of Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print

Over the break between semesters, I've been tackling some reading that doesn't concern my dissertation or research directly--and it's been a great break while still feeding my mind. I was especially happy to stumble across a free digital version of a book by Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia UP, 2009). The digital version may be found on Striphas's website, since he's offering it through a Creative Commons-licensed pdf through a "pay with a tweet" system (props to him for doing this).

So I want to offer my review of the book here (disclosure: I've also posted this review on Goodreads, and plan to post it on Amazon.com, too). Though it's not directly related to the medieval period, I do see a lot of implications here for how we think of book history; and I think that there is a lot here that intersects with how we think about scholarship.


In The Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas sets his main approach as a nuanced examination of American book culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, he challenges crisis discourses and laments for the loss of books. Striphas presents a well written, accessible, anecdotal, and effective critique of ideologies behind consumption, control, and transformations in American book culture.

Much of this study relies on the cultural history that Striphas establishes from the outset, emphasizing "the history and conditions by which books have become ubiquitous and mundane social artifacts in and of our own time" (4). By charting book culture from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first,  Striphas lays out "a changed and changing mode of production; new technological products and processes; shifts in law and jurisprudence; the proliferation of culture and the rise of cultural politics; and a host of sociological transformations, among many other factors" (5). He does so by focusing on various aspects of American consumerism, the book industry, legal history, media relationships, all circulating around attitudes about the value of books in the everyday. With these topics as the mainstay themes of the book, Striphas takes up the topics of American bibliophilia, digital media, big-box bookstores (especially Barnes and Noble), online marketing (especially Amazon.com), Oprah's Book Club, and Harry Potter--all centerpieces of his cultural examinations.

Ultimately, he demonstrates, through several case studies, "how printed books and electronic media can complement one another" through a type of "synergy" in culture (188). Yet he does not insist on ignoring the transformations that have taken place and will continue to occur. He equally insists that consumers must be aware of the ways in which control--by the industry, marketers, publishers, as well as consumers and various aspects of popular culture--underpin the most important facets of book culture. Indeed, the polemical features of Striphas's book emphasize the need for continual reconsideration of these issues to best understand the various complexities of intermedial relationships. This is particularly the case for his approach to intellectual rights laws in a global economy and with emergent digital concerns. All of this is offered with well-balanced and salient critiques of the past, the present, and the future.

As an extension of my review, I also find my own access and approach to this book intriguing for its implications about the type of "synergy" that can arise from print and electronic media. The fact that I accessed the book through a Creative Commons-licensed pdf, which Striphas offers essentially free (no need to go through the Columbia UP publisher; nor any need to mediate my reading through some sort of book-seller, in a store or online), raises a whole host of questions related to his discussions of control and consumption--I'm sure much could be said about this. I downloaded the digital version that Striphas offered on his site three years after the book's initial print release (2009); I synced it in my DropBox folder; I read the whole of it on my iPad, digitally annotating as I read. I may even buy a print copy now--but I will certainly keep the digital copy with all of my first-reading notes.

An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade

Now available in paperback!

Winner:
Best First Book Award from the Southeastern Medieval Association

Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, cultural, and intellectual developments of the intervening years.

Paradoxically, Charlemagne became less important to the Charlemagne legend. The legend became a story about the Frankish people, who believed they had held God's favour under Charlemagne and held out hope that they could one day reclaim their special place in sacred history. Indeed, popular versions of the Last Emperor legend, which spoke of a great ruler who would reunite Christendom in preparation for the last battle between good and evil, promised just this to the Franks. Ideas of empire, identity, and Christian religious violence were potent reagents. The mixture of these ideas could remind men of their Frankishness and move them, for example, to take up arms, march to the East, and reclaim their place as defenders of the faith during the First Crusade.

Matthew Gabriele is an associate professor and Coordinator of Medieval & Early Modern Studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech.

See his homepage.