Anglo-saxon Is An Important Book

By Author: Christ Pual
Total Articles: 55
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Foys's chapters on The Bayeux Tapestry and Nunburnholme Cross explore similar uses of New Media theory to understand early medieval objects. In contrast to the chapters on Anselm and the Cotton Mappamundi, however, these chapters also explore how New Media technology can be used to improve these objects' editorial representation. In the case of the Bayeux Tapestry, an Anglo-Norman account of William the Conqueror's conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, Foys shows how a digital medium can allow us to overcome restrictions of the print page. In the chapter on the Nunburnholme Cross, Foys speculates on how digital technology could be Thomas Sabo used both to reconstruct damaged aspects of medieval objects and, more importantly, to allow users to 'read' such objects temporally as well as spatially, recovering early uses and states and representing the interaction of different generations of artists and audiences through time.

If there is a criticism to be made of this book, it is that it occasionally falls into a type of technological determinism often found New Media studies: that is ...
... to say a sense that theoretical developments in understanding culture are subject to the same patterns of obsolescence that affect the technology of the age that produced them. Thus, in his discussion of Anselm's Omtiones, Foys shows how print and New Media differ in their ability to represent Anselm's resistance to linear and hierarchical readings of his prayers. Such resistance is of course difficult to reproduce in print and few if any printera scholars attempted to do so, preferring to concentrate instead on examining scribal variants, debating order and authorship, and distinguishing Anselm's original contributions from subsequent accretions. As Foys notes, the result is a standard text that, while perhaps written entirely by Anselm, nevertheless exists in Thomas Sabo Bracelets a form and with a stability never found in Anselm's own day. But while this approach may have been encouraged by technological limitations of the print codex, it is not at all clear that it has no place in a post-print edition. Anglo-Saxon audiences and contemporary scholars approach the Omtiones for different reasons, and, as a result, often require different texts. Even in a contemporary New Media presentation, there remains a place for a critical text that exhibits the same kind of patient critical intervention found in earlier print scholarship albeit alongside rather than instead of more fluid representations. Scholarship is inherently mediative and we turn to it for certain kinds of research precisely in order to benefit from the presence of an intervening intelligence.

Virtually Anglo-Saxon is an important book because of the licence (and models) it gives for the application of New Media theory to early medieval culture. As Foys's generous citations demonstrate, his readings of the objects in this book do not generally overturn contemporary consensus; but his application of New Media theory to the debates helps explain with remarkable clarity why this consensus is appropriate. Early theorists like Ong and McLuhan suggested the existence of a connection between the pre- and post-print worlds in their approach to culture; Foys shows how such connections can be understood in detail and provides a model that will surely be imitated.