Stranger/Medieval Things: An Introduction

What literacies are needed in order to read the medieval object today? Conversely, what light can readings mediated through medieval objects shed on the contemporary world? The aim of this issue of Digital Philology is to explore how the opacity of medieval objects, their very strangeness, makes them a useful lens for thinking through contemporary technologies and contemporary formulations of the digital corpus. Here strange should not be understood as “odd” but in its more etymological sense: “outside,” “external,” “distant.” What happens when medieval strangers are brought to bear on contemporary questions from which they might seem especially distant? What meanings are produced when we think through things that make themselves felt through their absence, or through things that highlight the gaps between and within themselves?

With the language of thinking through, I mean to capture two ways of thinking: using modern technologies as an analytical tool and taking modern technologies themselves as an object of medievalist analysis. In thus defining this issue’s stakes, I am thinking specifically of Bill Brown’s use of a dirty window to illustrate his distinction between objects and things.¹ Simply put, a clean window, through which we can look at something else in order to make meaning, is an object; a dirty window, no longer transparent, is a thing that draws attention to its own materiality and creates a new kind of subject-object relation. Increasingly, computers, networks, and digital artifacts are the windows through which today’s researchers view medieval books and artworks. When we use these tools, what are we truly looking at?

An enormous body of literature has been devoted in recent years to the practical and theoretical implications of the digitization of medieval texts: mostly laudatory, occasionally skeptical, but always impassioned. And with good reason: “the computer rules our research and studies.”² The availability of digital surrogates is beginning to rival the availability of accessible modern editions as one of “the primary determinants of canonization in teaching and scholarly practice in Medieval Studies,” as Heather Bamford and Emily C. Francomano have warned.³ Digitized manuscripts are alluring, thanks to the increased accessibility they afford, eliminating the geographical barriers built into traditional archival research. In times of pandemic, unrest, or restricted travel and immigration, they permit researchers to examine facsimiles of medieval objects from the comfort and safety of home. Online tools have enabled a burgeoning number of innovative and often collaborative projects, such as those described in the recent Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature and in Michelle Warren and Neil Weijer’s contribution to this issue. Digital editions also show the potential to recapture dimensions of the medieval manuscript codex that were irreproducible in the printed critical edition.⁴ But digitizations’ apparent immediacy (in the sense of unmediatedness, as set forth by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin) is only illusory.⁵ Our study of medieval objects is increasingly, but almost invisibly, dependent on the contemporary objects through which we study them: objects whose “double mimetic illusion” operates at the levels of both screen and machine.⁶ That dependency comes to the fore in the essays collected in this themed issue of a journal, one that is, after all, available exclusively in a digital format.

In many ways, the medieval codex and its digital or hypertextual replica share a fruitful and even uncanny resemblance. Medieval book history can be thought of as a succession of innovations in platform and process; it has often been claimed in recent years that “the digitized medieval manuscript [. . .] recaptur[es] something of the materiality and objecthood of the original.”⁷ Indeed, the purported similarities or analogies between manuscripts and digital media are commonly cited as a rationale for engagement with medieval things—medieval books, in particular—on contemporary terms. Computing metaphors have pervaded an entire generation of medieval literary scholarship, beginning with Stephen G. Nichols’s New Philology and its conception of the “manuscript matrix” as an “interactive space.”⁸ The metaphors operate in the other direction, too, with early digitization efforts characterized as the “digital incunable”—or somewhat less optimistically, as artifacts of the “digital dark ages.”^9...