Michelle R. Warren Reihenfolge der Bücher

Medieval books that survive today have endured significant challenges: fire damage, mold, insect infestations, reader annotations, fragmentation, and preservation mishaps. This work explores a specific manuscript—an Arthurian romance with roots in twelfth-century England—now existing in the digital realm of the twenty-first century. The evolution of this text has been shaped by various technologies, from paper-making to printing and digital media, revealing how literary history is intertwined with cultural technology influenced by colonial capitalism. Michelle Warren employs media theory, medieval literary studies, and book history to demonstrate how digital infrastructures transform texts, even ancient ones. She reveals a practice of tech medievalism that has influenced computing since the mid-twentieth century, highlighting how metaphors related to King Arthur and the Holy Grail are embedded in the technologies supporting medieval literature online. This infrastructural perspective on book history emphasizes that the meaning of literature is shaped by a diverse array of contributors beyond canonical authors, including translators, scribes, patrons, readers, librarians, and programmers. Situated at the crossroads of digital humanities, library sciences, and literary history, this work offers fresh insights into authorship, canon formation, and the very definition of a book.