Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies before Early Modernity ed. by Thora Brylow and Stephen M. Yeager (review)

Abstract

For those of us whose everyday work involves digital medieval studies, it is easy to forget that the pairing of “digital” and “medieval” may seem incongruous and in need of clarification. Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies before Early Modernity takes this explanatory impulse even further, for the collection both assumes a connection and argues for the need to explore it. To wit, the volume’s editors state in their introduction that “there are many urgent reasons to better understand the intuition that forms of medieval texts are uniquely expressive of the forms of digital culture, whose applications extend beyond the merely academic interest that this phenomenon many inspire” (7). The commonalities are puzzled through in an introduction and a series of six thoughtful essays that ruminate on what unites old and new media, thereby inviting readers to think again about the meaning of the concept of media itself. More importantly, the collection asks how and whether the traditions of conceptual exchange have endured despite the oftenunconscious intellectual reflex that tells us that the novel somehow expunges what came before. By grounding terminologies of the digital mindset in their medieval domains, Brandon Hawk’s opening essay immediately refutes the notion that newer forms of expression supersede those of the past. He underscores the lexical relationship of computerenabled concepts to both manual and, by extension, computational labor, which were most visible in the medieval monastic context. For example, Hawk looks first to Isidore for an etymological