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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies before Early Modernity ed. by Thora Brylow and Stephen M. Yeager Laura K. Morreale Thora Brylow and Stephen M. Yeager, eds. Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies before Early Modernity. Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2021. xiv + 250 pp., 11 ills. $59.95. ISBN: 978-1-988111-28-5. 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 often-unconscious intellectual reflex that tells us that the novel somehow expunges what came before. By grounding terminologies of the digital mind-set 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 computer-enabled 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 [End Page 143] grounding, then to Bede for evidence of the numerical sign language system used within his community. With these instances in mind, Hawk argues that the association between the digital and the computational has in fact never left us but was made clear once again only with the twentieth-century emergence of computer-based technologies (33). Stephen M. Yeager's essay moves beyond the lexical surface to dig deeply into the conceptual regimes that govern our understanding of media forms, particularly as they pertain to the uses of history and historiography. Yeager posits two opposing models for understanding how information is filtered to us; that is, through either a protocol or a regulatory approach. The protocol-based model is dynamic and invites a sense of continuity with the past, whereas the regulatory model imposes penalties when actions presented do not conform to preestablished norms, thereby promoting a view of history truncated from what has come before. To bring attention to and unseat this binary, Yeager argues that print culture is most often associated with regulatory control, whereas manuscript and digital culture are governed by protocol. These associations, Yeager contends, lead to an oppositional approach to history that hinders us from seeing commonalities across media regimes, or at least impedes our ability to engage in a nuanced consideration of the material remains of the past. In keeping with Yeager's meditations on received conceptual framings and how they shape our understanding of archived evidence, Kathleen Kennedy's historical reflection on the coconut cup in the late medieval and early modern period asks readers to reexamine the capacity of "medium," that is, what different media can accomplish and how. In her study of these admittedly exceptional housewares, she convincingly illustrates the power of the quotidian to transmit cultural meaning and to reflect subtle gradations of prestige. By contrasting two beverages (the high-status drinking chocolate with the low-status maté), describing the receptacles used to drink them, and tracing how they were transmitted from the South American to the European marketplace, she demonstrates how coconut cups communicated status for the products and their consumers. The connections she makes between the sensation of touching and even sharing a drinking vessel and the digital (finger-based) implications of that transaction reminds readers to [End Page 144] seek out and delight in...