Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewHoly Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet. Michelle R. Warren. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii+342.C. E. M. HendersonC. E. M. HendersonUniversity of Toronto Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book is an extended study of the context of a single manuscript, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 80, the sole (unfinished) copy of a fifteenth-century Middle English Arthurian romance by Henry Lovelich, a member of London’s Skinners’ Guild. Throughout, Warren reflects on the research experience itself; thus, this monograph “represents an extended ‘user journey’ through the infrastructure of medieval studies in the early twenty-first century” (xi). We learn how MS 80 was created, how it was initially read as a “history” (133), then interpreted by later readers as a “romance” (207) and discarded by even later ones as a “bad romance” (207), and has since interested a generation of scholars less inclined to dismiss the work of a “bad translator” (45). Additionally, Warren’s personal approach presents a tangible expression of how new digital platforms have allowed and even prompted new avenues in manuscript studies. In particular, Warren’s book is extensively concerned with the Parker Library (the manuscript’s home since Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Cambridge, donated his collection to Corpus Christi College in the late sixteenth century), especially the website, Parker Library on the Web, and its transition from version 1.0 (est. 2009) to 2.0 (est. 2018). On March 3, 2021, the website updated to version 2.1; this date thus forms the outermost boundary of Warren’s study, which, as she writes, makes it “dated but not obsolete” (34). This narrow focus is a strength of the book, not a weakness; it is best when discussing specific details of MS 80, its context, and Warren’s specific, time-bound experience of them. This book about “how digital infrastructure is changing the nature of books, even very old books” (5) is best not as the answer to the broad question that quote implies, but rather as a case study of how infrastructure made and remade this book in particular.The first two chapters deal with the context of the book’s creation in the fifteenth century. In “Translating Arthur: Books, Texts, Machines,” Warren traces MS 80’s sources, both codicologically (an unknown French manuscript similar to Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 178) and textually (the early thirteenth-century French prose Vulgate Cycle). In the second chapter, “Performing Community: Merchants, Chivalry, Data,” Warren investigates the social context of the manuscript and its commission by Henry Barton of the Skinners’ Guild, describing how the imagery in Lovelich’s text interacts with eucharistic controversies of the fifteenth century and the “corporate religion” (92) of the Guild and its fraternities. Together, the first two chapters show how Lovelich’s manuscript turns the authority and prestige of its sources towards new civic and national purposes.Chapter 3, “Marking Manuscripts: Makers, Users, Coders,” uses the ways that the book has been annotated over time to show how it left its original social context and became a different kind of networked object. John Cok, a prolific mid-fifteenth-century scribe with London connections, supplied the attribution to Barton (upon which much of chap. 2 depends); Archbishop Parker and his associates mined it for their Reformation defenses of England’s independence from Rome; the team behind Parker Library on the Web used the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to transform the book for the internet. Warren writes that “infrastructure remakes books by defining how they can be discovered” (139); this concern with the influence of infrastructure on books and literary history is further expanded in the following two chapters.In chapter 4, “Cataloguing Libraries: History, Romance, Website,” Warren shows how historical catalogues make literary history; in chapter 5, “Editing Romance: Poetry, Print, Platform,” she shows how editions do. Both catalogues and editions have a hand in defining genres, and the access they provide (or obscure) changes what literary history is available and what gets written. Warren demonstrates how machine indexing has (mostly unintentionally) influenced how Lovelich’s genre is understood, and how computerization causes and canonizes new errors, many of which can be traced back to nineteenth-century editorial decisions. Her discussion of the grandiose nationalist ambitions of editor Frederick J. Furnivall and the Early English Text Society (EETS) is ripe for further comparison to the rhetoric that often drives digitization projects. Nineteenth-century scholarship haunts digitization in other ways: in the case of the first version of the Parker Library on the Web, the subscription model “created two different literary histories: free access represented scholarship c. 1900 while subscription access represented scholarship c. 2000” (168).In chapter 6, “Reproducing Books: Binding, Microfilm, Digital,” Warren traces how MS 80’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century preservation efforts have been financed by American donors as part of a broader wave of spending the profits of colonial capitalism on cultural nostalgia for Englishness. As usual, Warren is at her most compelling when at her most particular, like when she discusses the motivations of Edward S. Harkness’s Pilgrim Trust and the subscription model of Parker 1.0 (abandoned with Parker 2.0), or when she close reads her own experience of encountering MS 80 on microfilm at Dartmouth College Library. Elsewhere, broad strokes undercut her stated intent. Particularly troubling in this chapter is how the issues are framed in terms of “comfort” and “gratitude”: “If it can feel uncomfortable to recognize the histories of violence that underlie philanthropy, it is even more uncomfortable to overlook them. Analysis and gratitude can go hand in hand” (241). Accordingly, while Warren draws some attention to colonialist theft and capitalist exploitation, the wealthy industrialists who funded manuscript preservation are remembered much as they would have wanted to be—primarily as philanthropists.The discussion of colonialism in chapter 6 is reflective of how the book occasionally promises somewhat more than it can deliver. The introduction in particular appears to anticipate forthcoming conclusions about books and the internet, but this is often where the book is weaker; in the first two chapters especially, the digital angle can feel superficial, or even be missed entirely without the volume introduction as a key. For example, the data of chapter 2 exists explicitly only in its introduction and conclusion. However, these moments of “infrastructure caught in the act of making history” (82) are themselves interesting examples of her broader point of how accessibility shapes literary history. We learn of them because of Warren’s decision to walk readers through her own research process, an overall strength of this monograph.Read more narrowly as a case study on MS 80 and the Parker Library, it is both interesting and informative. Throughout, Warren shows how the history of MS 80 has been shaped by platforms, “partly incidental to editorial selections” (212)—chosen for acquisition, preservation, editing, imaging, and proliferation across the internet not so much on its own particular merits but based on its position within broader collections (an Arthurian tale, a Parker Library manuscript, an EETS edition, etc). In this respect, tracing the histories of the editions in chapter 5 is especially well done. Chapters 4 and 5 especially will be of interest to book historians looking for a medieval example. Warren’s narrative is often undertheorized but never boring; her clear descriptions and explanations of context make this book accessible to nonspecialists. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722447 Views: 103Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 29, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.