On Digital-Medieval Manuscript CultureA Tentative Manifesto

This essay will examine what we define as digital-medieval manuscript culture, the production, dissemination, and use, scholarly or otherwise, of digital surrogates of medieval manuscripts. As we argue here, digital-medieval manuscript culture is continually in process and changing, as our tools, like those of the Middle Ages, evolve. In order to theorize digital manuscript surrogates—which need not be facsimiles, but rather any digital text or object intended to represent the contents and/or physical presence of a manuscript—as hyper-remediations that foreground medieval technologies in new media, we consider five interrelated aspects of digital-medieval manuscript culture: likeness, tangibility, presence, time, and intention(s).