Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet

by Michelle R. Warren

Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In this book, Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript--an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies--from paper manufacture to printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism.

Bringing to bear media theory, medieval literary studies, and book history, Warren shows how digital infrastructures change texts and books, even very old ones. In the process, she uncovers a practice of tech medievalism that weaves through the history of computing since the mid-twentieth century; metaphors indebted to King Arthur and the Holy Grail are integral to some of the technologies that now sustain medieval books on the internet. This infrastructural approach to book history illuminates how the meaning of literature is made by many people besides canonical authors: translators, scribes, patrons, readers, collectors, librarians, cataloguers, editors, photographers, software programmers, and many more. Situated at the intersections of the digital humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon formation, and the definition of a book.

Genres: Nonfiction

342 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Austin Benson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece. Cutting edge digital humanities theory meets classic codicological analysis, book history, and textual criticism. Plus a whole section on translation theory?!? This will be hard to follow up.

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult one to rate, since my feelings are mixed: three stars seems too low for a book that I DO think scholars in the area should pick up, but four seems too high for one which I often found unsatisfying. This book has a knack of getting 70% of the way to a really compelling idea or close reading, and then changing the topic. It kind of felt like Warren had written a much more interesting book originally but revised it to give it "broader appeal" and therefore lost the spark. There was something very exciting about discussing the strange online machine translation of the manuscript, for example, but I would have liked an actual close reading of some of its text. My favourite parts were Warren's investigations into indexing, cataloguing, and especially *financing* of manuscripts -- there was some fantastic stuff there, though I often had to read with Wikipedia in the other tab to fully flesh out the biographies of the various robber barons involved. Maybe that's on me, for not already having a deep knowledge of Standard Oil. Overall this is definitely a book that galvanized my own desire to combine media studies and book history for digital books, and I imagine I will cite chapter 6.

[Carola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is quite dry if you're not invested in the topic. I'm mostly pointing that out because I read it for very specific topics that were found for the most part in the second half of the book. I got through the first half very slowly because of how dry it was (interesting!, but dry). I considered skipping over some parts, but in the end I'm glad I didn't. It gave a lot of contextual information that was useful for the part of the book I was mostly interested in: the digitisation of MS 80 (roughly the second half of the book).

I really respect the way Warren links everything together - taking one specific manuscript as the center for this narrative was a brilliant move. It was fun to read this book alongside looking at MS 80 online. Warren does a marvellous job of tracing historical context, the creation of a manuscript, cataloging and metadata, access, and all the manuscript's different reproductions. There's something here for everyone interested in medieval manuscripts, or book history, or libraries, or digital humanities, or... etc. There are definitely some topics she discussed that I'd like to (and will!) dig into more.

[nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've given this a 4 for academic rigor and quality, as far as I can tell it--from a readerly perspective, though, I want to give it a 3. As a non-medievalist with zero tech background reading this for a graduate course, I often found it dense and dizzying, particularly when describing in detail the technical aspects of digitization. If this is your field, I'm sure this aspect won't be a problem, but I don't know if I would assign this for a course designed for non-experts.