“Old Media and the Medieval Concept successfully brings the richness of pre-modern media history into closer and more productive conversation with the field of media studies. This is vital work, since the orientation of media studies is often presentist or futurist, while manuscript studies, which is all that narrow understandings of ‘premodern media history’ might seem to include, has sometimes neglected the insights of media theorists working mostly with later material. By cleverly refiguring the ‘Middle Ages’ as the ‘mediating ages’ between the classical and Biblical texts that medieval manuscripts often contain or reference, and a later, putatively more enlightened historical moment, this volume’s distinguished contributors demonstrate that the histories, ecologies, and archaeologies of medieval media offer a vital means of understanding both then and now.”
Arthur Bahr, MIT

“From colonial coconut cups to mnemonic verse tags in manuscripts, Old Media and the Medieval Concept unearths a rich hoard of early media and brings them into dialogue with our present moment. The result is a vibrant collection that transgresses boundaries of period, place, and field. Media historians will look to this book, and the series it inaugurates, as a lodestar pointing us toward what the field could be: theoretically engaged, historically acute, and always attentive to the politics of our work.”
Whitney Trettien, University of Pennsylvania

"This collection is a gift to any teachers of cultural and social history, regardless of the epoch on which they focus. The fact that this book can be read in many directions--as a book about the theory of media, about manuscripts, about inscribed objects or about the digital world--makes it an instant scaffolding for many university courses. This is only strengthened by the citation practice which is open and inclusive as well as the diverse bibliography."
Mateusz Fafinski, The Medieval Review, 22 May 2022

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