Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by
fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into
fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In
this book, Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript-an
Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now
diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has
been propelled by a succession of technologies-from paper manufacture to
printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself
a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism.
Bringing to bear media theory, medieval literary studies, and book
history, Warren shows how digital infrastructures change texts and
books, even very old ones. In the process, she uncovers a practice of
"tech medievalism" that weaves through the history of computing since
the mid-twentieth century; metaphors indebted to King Arthur and the
Holy Grail are integral to some of the technologies that now sustain
medieval books on the internet. This infrastructural approach to book
history illuminates how the meaning of literature is made by many people
besides canonical authors: translators, scribes, patrons, readers,
collectors, librarians, cataloguers, editors, photographers, software
programmers, and many more. Situated at the intersections of the digital
humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy
Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon
formation, and the definition of a "book."
