Medieval Mediality

Via Jonas Wellendorf, a workshop on the media in which Old Norse literature was transmitted. The workshop is sub-project within the Swiss National Fund project ‘Mediality: Historical Perspectives’. Looks like a nice model for developing transhistorical discussions and frameworks. Some of our fascination with present media transformations often seems to assume the printed world as the default textual experience, rather than considering it the product and development of a specific space and time, and fails to recognize all of the different institutional frameworks and cultural practices (in different places and times) in the age of print itself. The print to electronic media transition dominates most debate, but recognizing the long (indeed longer [even if one periodizes strictly]) runs of oral media and the manuscript offer a rejoinder to our perspective.


And of course being a bit more in the thick of modern media studies can save medievalists from making the too facile equation between medieval literary media and the electronic age or manuscript as hypertext.

Comments are closed.