Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (review)

In the quarter century since the introduction of the personal computer, our world, including how we interact with it, has been unrecognizably transformed. Few academic libraries now use the formerly ubiquitous card catalogues; email is the most common form of written communication; and our students take it for granted that most of their research materials will be available in electronic rather than paper format. Such paradigmatic shifts have meant that we are also learning to see the most distant pasts in new ways. Virtually Anglo-Saxon is therefore a timely discussion of not only how some of these new ways of seeing (new media, virtual reality, hyper-text, and cyberspace) allow us to view Anglo-Saxon texts and artifacts in a new way, but also how seeing them in a new (and at times alien) light opens them up in entirely unexpected and enriching ways.

Foys is conscious of the irony that "this book is a book" and therefore "nothing like a CD-ROM" (p. 7), and keenly aware of the "solid, stolid, and traditional force of the physical object." The physical book continues to play a prominent role in promotion and tenure reviews, a role that digital projects, such as the Digital Edition of the Bayeux Tapestry Foys published in 2003, still do not play with the same gravitas a book possesses. Indeed, he has managed to incorporate some features of digital media in the book, and in particular a print version of hyperlinks, in the form of arrows with page references inviting the reader to turn to other sections of the book to continue reading. Using these hyperlinks immediately undermines the fixed linearity of the book in a way that parallels the fluidity of a Web document. Foys thus capitalizes on the knowledge that this book is not a CD-ROM, and that our minds are usually "associative," not "linear" (p. 8) and thus function more in keeping with a hypertext document than a printed book. One wishes that the publishers had included a CD-ROM with the book, as publishers of computing texts routinely do, so that one could also say that "there is nothing like a CD-ROM" despite the tactile pleasure a reader can have in actually holding a three-dimensional physical object, a notion imaginatively explored some years ago by Italo Calvino in his novel Once Upon a Night a Traveller.

Central to Virtually Anglo-Saxon is the idea of "the remediation of reality," a notion first developed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), who define it as the "formal logic by which new media refashion the prior media forms" (quoted by Foys, pp. 7-8). It applies not only to the kinds of media the twenty-first century makes available, but also to earlier media, such as the refashioning effect printed books had on manuscript culture, or "modern" notions of editing (mostly classical) texts had on the presentation/edition of unique texts such as Beowulf-unique in that it survives in a single manuscript (see, for example, the remarks by J. M. Kemble that Foys quotes [p. 13] on the superiority of printed editions to manuscript copies). Foys develops this idea most fully in chapter 1 ("Print and Post-Print Realities in Anglo-Saxon Studies"), with some incisive discussions of modern editions and theoretical considerations of such editions. Yet to his credit he remains fully (and humbly) aware that, in his words, "digital media are not silver bullets and do not offer any sure way to precisely and accurately recover the 'essence' of medieval expression any more than the technology of print does" (p. 36).

The chapters that follow explore, without being entirely definitive, the idea that "the experimental nature of the pre-print texts and multimedia from Anglo-Saxon England teaches us that we still have...