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

Abstract

Foys, Martin K. 2007. Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in Late Age of Print. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $59.95 he. xiv + 276 pp.In this important and indeed ground-breaking book, Martin Foys considers limits that culture has imposed on representation of preprint culture of Middle Ages, with specific reference to Anglo-Saxon England, and explores opportunities provided by digital technology, still in its infancy, to move beyond those limits. Building on work of theorists such Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin, Murray McGillivray and Jerome McGann, Foys attends to ways in which scholars in culture, usually without knowing it, refashioned what they preserved in light of their own ideologies and technologies of representation and reproduction (4-5). Foys is among those who contend that academic study is today at juncture in history of information processing and transmission significant that of Gutenberg revolution. If this perception is correct-and it is expressed by Foys with great persuasiveness-the implications are profound not only for Anglo-Saxon and medieval studies, but for literary research in general. Hence Virtually Anglo-Saxon, while it will be welcomed an agenda-setting contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship, is book that should command attention of literary studies community more widely, and indeed (for Virtually Anglo-Saxon is nothing if not interdisciplinary) of scholars of art and iconography also.In his first chapter Foys develops ideas that underpin book's approach, illustrating his argument with two concise case studies (on The Dream of Rood and Bede's treatise on finger calculation). This chapter is followed by four chapters presenting larger-scale case studies of contrasting medieval cultural productions, in which Foys is able to apply his approach and explore its implications. The book ends with reflective Epilogue that draws strands of argument together and provides room for some restrained crystal ball gazing.Referring to Anglo-Saxon scholarship in early period and in its later history, first chapter shows how in mediating medieval culture also remediated it, changing it through application of different representational model. Though maintaining illusion of transparency in its representation of medieval material, reconstructs it as something deeply in condition and aspect (6).The printed edition, in particular, is viewed by Foys perfect paradigm of remediation. The printed edition, in which the medieval text now enters fully dressed in grammar and punctuation (17), is a conflation of medieval manuscript variants in 'best text' that replaces both technological medium and textuality of medieval with that of modern (19). Observing that digital culture will fundamentally change both tools and epistemology of Anglo-Saxon studies, Foys ends chapter by setting up key theme of discussion in subsequent chapters, arguing that digital technology now offers prospect of recovering of Anglo-Saxon world that have remained unaccounted for in print (34-35).The following chapters examine particular cultural products from, or having associations with, Anglo-Saxon England, and introduce aspects of New Media theory to suggest new ways of understanding these products. The particular cultural products discussed are: Anselm's Meditations, collection that Foys views, in its permeability, its non-linearity and its aim of linking to (spiritual) world beyond text, kind of hypertext, with reader deciding how much or which parts of text to read in order to be led to prayer; Bayeux Tapestry, with its missing end frustrating desire for closure, another creation that Foys understands in digital terms, drawing attention to its combination of linear and spatial narrative; Anglo-Saxon mappamundi in eleventh-century manuscript Cotton Tiberius B. …