Michelle Warren’s Holy Digital Grail is a fascinating book about the long history of a medieval manuscript, from its creation to its place as a digitized object on the internet. I frequently use digitized manuscripts in my research and teaching, but it was only when reading Warren’s book that I stopped to think more about the infrastructures that sustain them. Often, freely accessible internet content is represented as unambiguously positive, but as Warren shows, it comes with great costs attached, particularly in terms of capital and environmental impact. The book changed the way I think about my research and my teaching, and I’m grateful I got the opportunity to review it for Modern Language Quarterly:
Like manuscripts themselves, digitization is the product of political and social history. Warren shows that when we encounter MS 80, our meeting is conditioned by infrastructures that enable our engagement—technologies supporting the website, the history of those technologies, and the funding that enabled their development, for instance—but also by the longer history of text technologies that have led to the manuscript’s survival and virtual reproduction. Thus the story of MS 80 encompasses the social and political conditions that created the tech boom in Silicon Valley, the ecological cost of the servers that host the Parker Library on the Web, the Reformation history that created Cor- pus Christi College’s Parker Library, and the mercantilism and nascent cultures of European colonialism and imperialism encoded in the manuscript from its origin. One manuscript may seem a small target for a monograph, but as the list above makes clear, Holy Digital Grail’s true focus is the deep history mediating our engagement with material objects. The study is a transformative account of contemporary manuscript research that illuminates the long-obscured institutional and infrastructural histories that drive medievalist scholarship.
You can read the review here.