Warren 2022

Warren, Michelle. Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

Introduction

In the process, literary history, too, became a cultural technology.

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Among the many medieval texts about Arthur, MS 80 is unique. It was created, moreover, in unlikely circumstances: in the early fifteenth century, a craftsman of the London fur trade, Henry Lovelich, translated archaic French prose into more than fifty thousand lines of English rhym- ing couplets. The book was meant to be illustrated but remained incom- plete and possibly unread for a number of years. MS 80 may be obscure, but six centuries later it isn’t hard to find if you know where…

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By the end of my first day in Cambridge, I already had more ques- tions than I could possibly answer even if I stayed for several weeks. I was therefore delighted to learn that I could purchase a microfilm of MS 80. Thus, even before I left the reading room, modern technologies were revising my relationship with the manuscript and my approach to literary hist…

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There, in the newly renovated reading room, I started to see digital images as more than a convenience. Just as the manuscripts had been moved into a new vault for better protection, the website required attention and updating to remain accessible. The digital images and their associated data were more fragile in some ways than the oldest book in the vault. The website was a new material object that had become part of book history.

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This term is a metaphor that refers to a digital preservation system as durable as the refined animal skin used for many medieval books—some more than a thousand years old and counting (vellum serves here, and throughout this book, as a ge- neric synonym f…

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My journey to digital studies was sealed in 2015 when I first read about the idea of “digital vellum” (Lepore 2015).

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Digital vellum” would provide a solution to this problem of digital preservation. Until that solution is invented, we operate in what has been called the “digital Dark Ages”—another medieval metaphor. This term correlates informa- tion depravation with the state of Europe after the Roman Empire. The rhetorical “Dark Ages” serves as a shorthand for ignorance, social chaos, economic failure, and all bad things that should be left behind. In digital discourse, then, medieval metaphors point to both the problem of pres- ervation (a looming “Dark Ages”) and the solution (a “vellum” that will rescue precious objects). This solution, however, remains elusive, a “holy grail” as it turns out. These three medieval metaphors bring the internet to the heart of manuscript studies and literary history in the twenty-first century. And they make medieval studies integral to understanding the deep histories of…

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Information tools had shaped both my curiosity and my ignorance: at first, I could only know what others had already found important.

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MS 80’s trajectory exemplifies how books persist through time as part of complex economies that continually shape and reshape their meaning. Their exis- tence on a shelf and their distribution online rest on a bedrock of capital

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accumulation via global imperialism. As I followed MS 80’s movements across these many platforms, the platforms themselves came into focus as meaning makers. Throughout this book, I will argue that literary history is coauthored by the technology platforms that produce and preserve texts.

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The very vocabulary of digital technology obscures the realities of infrastructure: “home” pages make novelty seem familiar, while the “cloud” covers the cables that make electronic display possible. The interactions among books, texts, software, hardware, aesthetics, and capitalism have become so complex that they are harder and harder to grasp.

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What is a medievalist—or anyone—to do in the face of these tensions? How can literary history account for this complex inheritance? Through- out this book, I give several answers by investigating long histories of preservation and access.

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My analysis encompasses vast interconnected networks in order to catch infrastructure in the act of turning fiction into facts, text into poetry, docu- ments into art, and speculation into scholarship. As Whitney Trettien has put it: “Only in acknowledging and historicizing how media technologies remediate, disseminate, and store scholarship in the humanities and its subject matter can we begin to rework these networked technologies in ways that challenge a hegemonic, market-driven notion of what contem- porary techne is, or could be” (Trettien 2018, 56). The value of a text or book is not as a fixed commodity but a fluctuating index of social and technologic…

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By connecting medieval m phors in computing with medieval books reproduced on computers, I open the study of books toward the study of the infrastructures that sustain books—as objects, on shelves, in communities.

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What is a book? Where is a book? When is a book? These questions align with an infrastructural approach to book history: the answers are not single or fixed but infinitely variable. One task, then, of literary history is to answer these questions with many stories about how texts and books endure—from collecting to catalogu- ing to editing to financing. Integrating literary history with infrastructure studies expands the relevant “plot points” in these …

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I argue that there is no getting around the digital knowledge economy, even while holding the manuscript in the Parker Library reading room.

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Together, these six chapters integrate the social functions of literature with the political functions of technology. MS 80 serves as a catalyst for an approach to literary his- tory that accounts for preservation and access alongside production and aestheti…

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Tech medievalism rests on popular stereotypes about the European Middle Ages as either a depraved time ended by modernity or an ideal- ized time that modernity should recover. This duality makes medieval metaphors particularly useful for technologists, since it positions inven- tion as a comprehensive solution to past and future problems. In tech medievalism, medieval means “outdated,” even as certain medieval icons align with futuristic p…

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Time and again, “grail” has proven an irresistible image for heroic innovation. This phenomenon makes MS 80 part of the long transmis- sion of Arthurian legend from the “Dark Ages” to the “digital Dark Ages.”

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In medieval literature, the Holy Grail is a sorting technology: it sepa- rates the ignorant and impure from the genuine Christian knight.

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In computing, then, grail metaphors shore up the romantic idea that invention is driven by individual geniuses endowed with innate superiority, with the mass of collaborators consigned to defeat even before they begin.

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The grail metaphor mystifies computing—and defines computing as a mystification. With the GRAIL project, digital interface entered the world as a medieval metaphor that taught users not to ask too many questions about machines or their makers.

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The GRAIL interface crystallizes two enduring aspects of digital in- frastructure: metaphor as a device and singular solutions as an ideology.

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Metaphors rely on users’ ability to t fer a familiar idea to a new context; if the existing associations and the new ones are mismatched, the transfer fails.

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Pen

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All the technologies that sustain MS 80’s multimedia history have been associated with the Holy Grail at some point.

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The allure of Arthurian magic keeps g erating promises that technology will solve every problem. The counterpoint to these aspirational images comes from the “digital Dark Ages,” which invokes the ignorance and social chaos that might ensue from the loss of digital information.

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The “digital Dark Ages” are simultaneously a fact of the past (many things have already been lost), a condition of the present (new things are lost every day), and a projected future event (when more things will have been lost).

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Each new iteration can expose how digital infrastructures affect knowledge systems. Parker 1.0 is now evidence of an important historical moment in the practice of medieval studies, library science, and internet publishing. It reveals the current arrangements to be arrangements—not natural, inevitable, or “better” but rather the tem- porary products of complex interactions among communities, protocols, machines, and capital. These arrangements are not obstacles to overcome but infrastructures to understand. In a very real sense, they are writing the future of medieval studi…

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Cerf’s “digital v lum” would be a self-contained format that would include its own virtual operating system and hardware specifications, enabling digital objects to function long after the conditions of their creation have disappeared. This solution requires not only standardized descriptions for all the elements of hardware and software but the secure communication of those standards into the future (no small hurdle).

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In this imagined archival future, entire computing systems function as self-contained “books” on digital shelves. They could be moved to new environments without losing their functions; they could last for years even if no one opens them.

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The Archimedes Codex also became what it is today because of Ad- ams’s patronage—first acquiring the book and then funding all the digital research (Netz and Noel 2007, 277). It thus embodies another dimension of tech medievalism—in this case, turning tech profits toward cultural heri- tage preservation. Financial resources are of course always integral to the making and saving of books, whether by individuals or institutions. Capital curates. The names in the shelf marks of medieval manuscripts—such as Robert Cotton (d. 1631), Francis Douce (d. 1834), or Thomas Phillips (d. 1872)—attest to the flow of British imperial profits into book colle…

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The twentieth-century history of the Archimedes Codex testifies starkly to the geopolitics of survival: someone in Turkey needed money and sold the book; Guerson needed money to enable his own survival and sold the book

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again; for lack of a buyer, the book stayed in a basement and got moldy; in the hands of a new owner, it became an international superstar, propelled to celebrity by substantial investments in new technologies. While few books have had histories this dramatic, many have passed through more modest cycles of care and neglect. All share in the geopolitical circuits that commodify books and information.

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Pen

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The Archimedes Codex provides a revelatory parable for book his- tory in the “digital Dark Ages”—not because it is typical but because it

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is exceptional, representing nearly every possibility. A Christian monk did preserve Archimedes’s texts (just as Kuny and many others imagine) but only by trying to erase them. Some aspects of the book are com- pletely accessible (on the internet) and others hardly accessible at all (in Adams’s private library). Indeed, the book now has many distinct forms, each with different access modes and each sustained by differ- ent infrastructures: tenth-century vellum (supporting text and images from the tenth, thirteenth, and twentieth centuries); twentieth-century photographs (and their digitized copies); twentieth- and twenty-first- century print editions; twenty-first-century digital images (in multiple color-processed versions). Every effort to preserve the codex has been partly destructive; some destructive actions have enabled preservation (Lowden 2011, 213). Digitization has done the same: in order to image the pages and read the book, the book had to be taken apart and made largely unreadable. Now, each leaf is encased in an individual frame, all housed in a custom-made cabinet (Quandt 2011, 156–61). Is this format still a book? At some point, we may know which lasted longer—the pages in boxes or the related bits now scattered across multiple servers and personal computers. The fate of the codex is bound …

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The material history of a book includes all its forms across the centuries—manuscript, photo- graphs, editions, translations, storage boxes, microfilms, photocopies, and digital files. And all the people involved with these formats are bookmak- ers: artisans, scribes, editors, patrons, translators, conservators, collectors, photographers, programmers, librarians, and many other cultural laborers. Their collective actions—and inactions—create and conserve the artifact and its perceived s…

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Second, the reproduction of the Archimedes Codex in multispectral digital images points to the role of technology in constructing material history. For the palimpsest, numerous computational interventions re- vealed previously unreadable text. This result rests on layers of hardware engineering, software design, and scientific research into the nature of reflective light and X-rays. The networked distribution of the digital files adds more layers of infrastructure. Photographing manuscripts isn’t at all new, but networked images—especially those made to represent what humans cannot otherwise see—materialize new ways of knowing. These technologies draw book history into the field of critical infrastructure studie…

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Finally, all these forms and materials constitute “the text.” The Archi- medes Codex represents an extreme case (discovery of previously unknown texts) of the general situation (knowing about texts at all).

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What we think we know about the past emerges over and over again from an ever-shifting interplay of preservation, ob- solescence, adaptation, and destruction.

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Medieval books accessible on the internet thus have all the components of the internet itself. They require electricity, cables, hardware devices, software applications, transfer protocols, file format standards, markup standards, and so forth. Their many different iterations—codex, PDF, JPEG, and more—manifest remarkable continuities as well as numer- ous salient distinctions. From different vantage points, a book is at once storage device, format, interface, platform, and infrastructure itself. Every change in these technologies changes the nature of books. The global infrastructure of the internet impinges directly on the material remains of medieval Eu…

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McKenzie d strated that medieval manuscripts, printed books, and digital media belong together. His “sociology of texts” doesn’t even require a codex. Instead, it rests on a sociological understanding of the entire infrastructure that makes and maintains media.

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Digital images derived from medieval manuscripts are yet another form on this continuum from books to bits.

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Every interface orients users in particular ways, structuring the very possibilities of thought. Books are also platforms—structures that make meaning out of other components and can themselves become components of other structures.

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At the broadest scale, books manifest the very infrastructure that sustains them—from bindings shaped by shelf placement to the processing load required to visualize an image.

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In digital environments, “the economic logics typical of platforms” and “the public interests and quasi-universal services formerly characteristic of many infrastructures” become inseparable: “The question is not only who profits and controls, but who, and what, is cast aside along the way” (Plantin et al. 2018, 306). The very properties of infrastructure—as services and materials that fade from view so long as they are functioning— make this question difficult to answer. The effort, though, is book history for t…

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That is, infrastructure isn’t a fixed kind of material (a cable, a website) but a way of relating with that material that begins at a certain point in time—and may end at another. A book is a moment in time as much as a thing in space; it changes with each style of engagement.

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Ultimately, a medieval manuscript that has been photographed is a hybrid book-form.

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If digital images are part of a hybrid book-form, what kind of part are they? The question of how to name the relationship between an image and a codex is itself an element of infrastructure. Terminology reveals a “way of knowing” a copy that becomes “what it is”: terminology is epistemology that slips into ontology.

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In medieval studies, terms used as near s onyms include facsimile, surrogate, version, edition, simulacrum, and avatar (all in Echard 2008, 198–216; most in Treharne 2013).

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Rather than choose a single term, we might contribute to what Bridget Whearty has called a “rigorous codicology” of images (2018, 197) by drawing distinctions that name the variable functions of im- ages in hybrid book-forms.

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MS 80 shows how infrastructures coauthor literary history.

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Each time, the conditions of access shaped my understanding of the books.

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The fact that almost none of the historical data sources have “stayed put”—including MS 80 itself—reflects a combination of economic, political, and techno- logical pressures that have directly influenced the stories that can be told about the past.

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When Early English Books Online changed its interface on July 7, 2020, for example, the nature of early modern books changed, too. In an instant, EEBO became less visible as a collection with a complex multimedia his- tory of cataloguing, microfilming, digitizing, and transcrib…

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At the same time, individual items became more discoverable from searches started elsewhere. Those results, though, will favor the 40 percent of the EEBO collection with full-text transcription (“Early English” 2020; https://text- creationpartnership.org, …

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These variations are pointed reminders that search carries history and that platform integration can fragment data rather than consolidating them.

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Taken together, the catalogues prescribe as much as they describe: they reproduce books as projections that become as real as the books on the shelves.

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MS 80 thus intersects with the basic infrastructure that defined “English” in nationalist and imperialist terms in the nineteenth century. These data—and the values that produced them—still circulate through digital platforms.

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The t mission of Lovelich’s text from printed editions into the OED and onto the subscription platform Literature Online illustrates what I call “platform philology”—turning poetry into data and back again.

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Simultaneously, each format distributes the text through what I call “platform codicology”— imparting literary value through publishing formats and protocols.

Translating Arthur

The idea that knowledge and power move in a linear, westerly direction, however, is a myth told by Western powers themselves: neither knowledge nor imperial sovereignty are as hegemonic or sequential as the myth sug- gests. Instead, translatio creates and destroys in spiraling cycles of partial preservation and fragmented loss. Translation thus encodes the demise of the empires it seems to susta…

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My approach to the book builds on the work of manuscript scholars who integrate tex- tual, visual, and material analysis (Busby 2002; Meuwese 2007; Drimmer 2018), particularly those who have studied MS 80 (Meale 1994; Eddy 2012). I also expand on medieval translation theories that foreground relation- ships between knowledge and power (Stahuljak 2004; Rikhardsdottir 2012; Campbell and Mills 2012). The result recuperates a sense of MS 80 as a single text, contrary to literary histories that have treated Lovelich as the translator of two separate works—a Christian lesson in moral conduct (Grail) and a romance of Arthurian knights (Merlin) (Wells 1916; Ackerman 1959; Hodder 199…

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This division of the single book into two texts obscures the relationship between Christian themes and chivalric ones; it also obscures Lovelich’s accomplishments as a translator.

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MS 80 was designed to be a grand book. It was made c. 1435 from large sheets of paper, a relatively expensive imported material (Da Rold 2020b, 58–90, 172). It has all the marks of high-quality commercial produc- tion (Meale 1994, 217–19).

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A little farther on, another quire has several generic rubrics that sug- gest a plan to furnish the book with vivid imagery. This quire has more spaces than any other surviving quire—fifteen in all. And one opening has more than any other—four, each annotated with various forms of the word pageant (ff. 153v–154r; see fig. 4); another “pageant” follows a few folios later after three spaces without rubrics (f. 159r; all noted in Kock 1904–32, 462). Pageant is used in other manuscripts to denote “picture”; the word can also refer to plays, props in plays, and processions (Driver 2014). In MS 80, the rubricated spaces punctuate a battle scene and so might refer to the “procession” of troops int…

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They also show that Arthurian books were one of the ways in which merchants adopted aristocratic habits in their quest for social and economic success.

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MS 80 stands out as an unusually ambitious project. The translation itself was an enormous undertaking. And the book’s luxury aspirations contrast markedly with the most commonly available French manuscripts, which were relatively plain and undecorated (Middleton 2003, 224). If the purpose was only to inform a new community about Britain’s remarkable origins, a simpler book would have sufficed. Instead, Lovelich and his fellow guildsman Barton initiated a project that would make the story accessible in English while also reproducing the prestige that accrued to deluxe illustrated manuscripts. The book could then symbolize the guild’s aspiration to increase its social standing and exert influence over civic affairs. The book was meant to be seen as much as heard. While it probably never reached its destination, the material format points to this visionary intent.

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The machine translation of Lovelich’s grail narrative, then, perfects the grail as the quintessen- tial symbol of a secure knowledge economy. Yet like the myth of transla- tio studii et imperii, MT masks contradictions that would destabilize the transmission of kno…

Performing Community

Evidence from wills, inventories, and surviving books documents about 160 London merchant book owners in the late Middle Ages (Scott 2014). Their books represent a whole range of genres, from business records to chronicles, romances, and books for pious study (Boffey 2010). Books themselves were a “recognized way of holding capital in a portable and negotiable form” (Mynors 1963, xi; cited in Lawton 1983, 42).

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Marking Manuscripts

The digital reproduction of m eval manuscripts has brought these historical marking practices into dialogue with the networked “markup” that defines how texts and im- ages appear on websites and how users can interact with them. Marks

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in the margin are thus far from marginal: they point to entire systems of social relations, textual interpretation, cultural classification, and tech- nological infrastructure.

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Even though one might usually distinguish between, say, an accidental smudge and intentional verbal commentary, in this chapter I treat marks, notes, and annotations of all kinds somewhat interchangeably. They are all part of the infrastructure that produces meaning in and around books. All these marks arise from accessing the book; they all require interpretation. From the perspective of infrastructure—in which a book is also a storage device, format, interface, and platform (see my introduction)—all kinds of marks participate equally in making the book. Whether in manuscript or online, annotations are part of the infrastructure that sustains books.

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Annotations are both c nents and products of the systems that produce, preserve, and distribute books and texts—such as catalogues, editions, and reproductions.

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Annotations, then, plait together literary history and book history.

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Since Parker’s time, MS 80’s annotations have shifted from textual inter- pretation to cataloguing, editing, and reproduction. These newer marks locate the book in larger networks of books, both within and beyond Parker Library. Whether on the pages of the shelf-book or in the code of the digital book, annotations reflect and create netw…

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Like earlier annotations, these modern marks make the book more accessible for a particular kind of reader. Librarians and editors are thus also bookmakers who contribute to the meaning of medieval manuscripts.

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Cataloguing Libraries

Yet every book—on a shelf or online—is marked by the

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history of its journey into a catalogue or index. These marks shape what can be found and by what pathways. Library catalogues thus prescribe as much as they describe. They project ideas about books even in the absence of the books themselves. Through description and classification, catalogues create, sustain, and sometimes even disrupt literary history.

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Library catalogues epitomize the definitions of book that I outlined in my introduction: they are devices that store information, formats that structure information, interfaces between users and books, platforms that distribute information, and components of library infrastructure.

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In short, metadata make the book.

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Together, the Parker manuscript catalogues tell a history of books and texts that begins with Protestant polemics and ends with database debates.

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In this chapter, I investigate how Parker Library catalogues have made and remade the book now called MS 80.

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The scope of cataloguing remains largely national at best, just as in Parker’s day. For many reasons, then, a vast gap remains between what is desirable, what is technically possible, and what is feasible within and across institutions.

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Literary history is written in this gap.

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Preserved in multiple fragments, it embodies the fragmented future of books on the internet.

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Editing Romance

The history of publishing thus turns into the history of the canon.

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Indeed, some nineteenth-century editions remain the only editions of certain texts.

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Even when newer editions exist,

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the mass digitization of public domain books over the past fifteen years has made nineteenth-century editions readily available—more or less for “free” and more or less “new” from the perspective of many readers, in- cluding new generations of students. Through mass digitization, the na- tionalist values that shaped many nineteenth-century editorial decisions remain very much part of how we access medieval literat…

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Editions are themselves a significant part of book history. They ex- emplify the definitions of book that I outlined in my introduction. Edi- tions are devices that store texts, formats that structure texts, interfaces between manuscripts and readers, platforms that distribute texts, and components of educational infrastruc…

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Whether in print or online, editions contribute to literary history through both their texts (philology) and their formats (codicology). As publications, editions are produced by what I call “platform philology”—practices of textual production that obscure the individuals who bring texts out of manuscripts and into wider circulation. Editions also embody “platform codicology”— practices in publishing that influence how edited texts circulate as part of larger collections.

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At the juncture of all these formats, platforms edit texts, publish books, and write literary history.

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His influence is far-reaching indeed: paper slips written by Furnivall are still in use at the OED (Gilliver 2016, 582); EETS editions provide many of the OED’s historical citations; the dates given by EETS editors became the dates cited in the OED; for many texts, EETS editions remain the only edi- tions. In this way, each platform reinforced the others, deflecting attention from some of the shakier foundations of philological practi…

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…mass printing and mass digitizing have many similarities. The Roxburghe Club approach to reprinting, for example, has been compared to Google’s approach to scanning: reproductions increase access and can influence reading patterns (Husbands 2013, 130). Similarly, the kind of “mass collabo- ration” that Furnivall organized for the Philological Society’s Dictionary Committee has been compared to digital crowdsourcing (Gilliver 2016, …

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From the perspective of editorial practice, then, digital libraries remain fundamentally tied to print models even as they have increased the range of source materials and the rate of copying. These parallels pinpoint what today’s knowledge economy has inherited from the nineteenth century— which is the first step toward making good use of “bad data” like a Fur- nivall editi…

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One of the latest formats for circulating old texts is the “print-on- demand” (POD) codex—a book printed from a digitized print book. POD editions of public domain texts illustrate the workings of platform codicology in concert with platform philology and literary h…

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For rare editions of medieval texts, a POD codex culminates two centuries of editorial platforming.

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Today, platform philology and p form codicology combine to bring old ideas about romance back into the marketplace. POD editions that are both new and old recall the somewhat haphazard conditions that extracted text from MS 80 in the first place. In the repackaging of a Roxburghe edition as a cheap paperback, format itself generates new ways of reading romance.

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The literary history of romance brought MS 80’s text into print, and the platform history of publishing has now brought it onto LION in the form of digitized editions. Platforms build on each other, the products of one

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becoming components of another. With editions, this process of textual transmission amounts to philology by platform.

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Furnivall’s Roxburghe Grail illustrates the formative work of platforms in producing medieval literature.

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Furnivall treated the edition itself as a platform with various inter- changeable components.

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By design, digital platforms minimize their editorial contributions to bolster the authenticity of their texts. This, too, they inherit from nineteenth-century print platforms.

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The metadata for Lovelich on LION show how platforms rewrite liter- ary history as they reedit texts (surveyed March 22, 2020).

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The corollary of platform philology is platform codicology—publishing arrangements that distribute editions in collections. When published in a series, an edition is not only an individual book but also part of a larger corpus of similar books. The characteristics of the series influence the meaning of each individual volume. Here, too, nineteenth-century print practices and twenty-first-century digital systems operate in mutu- ally informing ways. The publishing platforms that distributed medieval texts—Roxburghe and EETS—developed material consistencies that made each individual volume recognizable as part of a larger collection. As the series accumulated on shelves, they became coherent canons. And when they accumulated on library shelves, their classification in cataloguing systems contributed to selection patterns for mass scanning projects, with far-reaching consequences for the digital libraries that have become so integral to the knowledge economy. Digitized books produced from scans extend questions of format to new technologies. Platform components such as file specifications, interfaces, hardware, and software structure access to networked libraries and can reframe lit…

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Digital images of printed books are ultimately somewhat inciden- tal to the functions of digital platforms: one of the most powerful ad- vantages of digital libraries is text search, which doesn’t require page images. Nonetheless, digital platforms remain invested in images and in the rhetorical codex—the idea of the book as a format that authen- ticates information. The rhetorical codex distracts users from the fact that “full-text search” is often anything but (Pope and Holley 2011). The nature of this rhetorical codex depends on the platform’s f…

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Google’s paradigm has drifted away from the codex over time to pro- mote information, while the nonprofit platforms have maintained and even strengthened their rhetorical commitments to shelves and “paper libraries” (Internet Archive).

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The Internet Archive, meanwhile, has defended the code properties of digital files in court. Countering a lawsuit from publishers about Controlled Digital Lending, Brewster Kahle has underscored the symmetry of online and offline libraries: both exist to “buy, preserve, and lend books” (Kahle 2020).

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For profit-oriented platforms, by contrast, books are “ formation” that they own: customers acquire the storage format, not the content. In this model, books are licensed, not owned.

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These rhe- torical moves make a digitized print book sound very much like a digitized manuscript. The platforming of editions thus offers important lessons for book history, including digitized medieval manuscripts, where interfaces and rhetoric are also influencing access and interpretati…

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Over time, Google has pivoted away from the rhetorical codex. Indeed, all along, codex properties have been treated as “bugs rather than features” by the technologies of industrial text extraction (Chalmers and Edwards 2017).

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This temporal reversal crystallizes how digital reproduction acts on historical books, including medieval manuscripts: reproduction creates feedback loops that also ensnare the original shelf-books.

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Finally, the cost of POD editions suggests how platform algorithms configure book history.

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All these prices stem from the market value of single copies calculated either historically or algorithmically. The prices should represent differences in rarity but instead represent the failure of algorithms to distinguish between an original and a reprint. The automated calculation of scarcity produces a market reversal: a POD codex becomes a high-priced rare commodity because it looks like a single unique copy. This breakdown of network capitalism, like handprints in a PDF, exposes the inner workings of the information economy. Some- where deep in proprietary code, an algorithm turned affordable books into rarified commodities. The unreliability of these calculations serves as a salutary reminder that “value” is assigned to books and texts for all kinds of reasons—including some that have more to do with platforms and infrastructure than with the books and texts themsel…

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Reproducing Books

The wide accessibility of digital images of manuscript pages over the last few decades is one of the most remarkable developments in book his- tory. Even though only a fraction of all surviving manuscripts has been photographed, digital repositories have grown large enough to generate new styles of engagement with medieval books. They are also defining new canons of material culture by exposing patterns of selection: famous books and famous libraries attract the most investment. In this way, digi- tization projects replicate some of the same factors that drive medieval manuscript collecting in the first place. Like acquisition, reproduction has the capacity to concentrate both capital and literary canons. Even before digital images, other forms of photography drew medieval manu- scripts into these circuits: relatively expensive print facsimiles offered collectors ownership of rare books; relatively cheap microfilms prom- ised large-scal…

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Photographs of manuscripts expand the repertoire of “the book” that I outlined in my introduction. They are devices that store visual informa- tion, formats that structure visual information, interfaces between source documents and users, platforms that distribute visual information, and components of infrastr…

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Looking back to microfilm from the vantage point of digital photography clarifies the role of technology infrastructure in book history.

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MS 80’s reproduction history shows the interdependence of copying technologies. Rather than a succession from handcraft to industrial ma- chinery, each reproduction depends on the others; today, they all func- tion simultaneously.

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…to the rapid expansion of medieval manuscript photography in the 1930s and 1940s: heightened fears among scholars and government officials that unique documents of national interest could be destroyed by war; increased affordability of photographic technologies; Ameri- can philanthropists’ investments in European cultural …

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The microfilm of MS 80 is part of this history of m tography, which was developed as a nationalist expression of document rescue. The politics of reproduction extend to the format itself, which turns a codex into a roll that requires a machine interface.

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The microfilm r duction of medieval manuscripts across these decades is one piece of a much larger investment in creating a self-sufficient knowledge economy in the United States. In this light, manuscript microfilms are the material remains of a nationalist definition of European heritage constructed by a convergence of academic, government, and private interests.

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The idea that films could replace books was built into the practice of microfilm as a preservation technology, first deployed on a mass scale amid fears that wartime bomb- ings could destroy whole libraries. By definition, then, microfilm defined the codex—even a very valuable one—as a potentially replaceable storage device. The unique book with a fixed geolocation would become a film roll that could be copied many times over and used simultaneously in many locations. In this process, every kind of document becomes the same kind of document: the first book printed in English, Caxton’s Recuyell of the His- tories of Troy, could be reproduced as easily as a 1914 copy of the Saturday Evening Post (Power 1990, 232). In the United States, microfilming was seen as democratizing and even antifascist in releasing control of information from foreign governments (Carpenter…

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For book history, microfilms introduce a new scale of infrastructure into the repertoire of “the book.” Today, that infrastructure often includes a computer.

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In the same period that digital r tion has made microfilm seem obsolete, microfilm interfaces have become computers that turn the roll into a specific kind of digital book.

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The collaborations among the SSRC, ACLS, and MLA in support of scholarly microfilm came at the direct expense of earlier initiatives for racial justice. These connections show that technologies of cultural preservation are inseparable from social and political definitions of who and what is worth saving.

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Every cultural heritage institution faces this dilemma. The physical conservation of the books and the data re- quires control of both temperature and humidity. In the context of climate change, rising global temperatures endanger the longevity of both books and bits. These factors combine in a circular fashion: climate change pu…

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archives and library collections at risk; preserving collections contributes to climate change (Pendergrass et al. 2019).

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The bounds of ethical tech include, minimally, remembering these wider histories and integrating them into book history.

Conclusion

Each shift creates “the text.” They are collectively “the book.” The book “itself” is not a single object but rather a repertoire of forms, each with a story to tell. Each form reconfigures what it inherits from its

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predecessors—an English translation of a French book, a printed edition of a manuscript text, a digital edition of a printed catalogue. Even confused or erroneous metadata become vital sources of information for certain ques- tions, as are failed page loads and paywall notices. Each form—manuscript, print, microfilm, media file, among others—enables distinctive types of inquiry, with zones of interchangeability. Comparative studies of media, platforms, and interfaces help define the shapes of those zones and thus also each form’s unique affordances. Through the infrastructures that create and sustain these forms, the knowledge economy is saturated with colonial, imperial, and racist fo…

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In the study of literature and books in digital environments, then, interfaces are integral and meaningful even if they are variable and ephemeral.

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