Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print

Foys, Martin K. 2007. Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $59.95 he. xiv + 276 pp.

In this important and indeed ground-breaking book, Martin Foys considers the limits that print culture has imposed on the representation of the preprint culture of the Middle Ages, with specific reference to Anglo-Saxon England, and explores opportunities provided by digital technology, still in its infancy, to move beyond those limits. Building on the work of theorists such as Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin, Murray McGillivray and Jerome McGann, Foys attends to the ways in which scholars in print culture, usually without knowing it, "refashioned what they preserved in the light of their own ideologies and technologies of representation and reproduction" (4-5). Foys is among those who contend that academic study is today at a juncture in the history of information processing and transmission as significant as that of the Gutenberg revolution. If this perception is correct-and it is expressed by Foys with great persuasiveness-the implications are profound not only for Anglo-Saxon and medieval studies, but for literary research in general. Hence Virtually Anglo-Saxon, while it will be welcomed as an agenda-setting contribution to Anglo-Saxon scholarship, is a book that should command the attention of the literary studies community more widely, and indeed (for Virtually Anglo-Saxon is nothing if not interdisciplinary) of scholars of art and iconography also.

In his first chapter Foys develops the ideas that underpin the book's approach, illustrating his argument with two concise case studies (on The Dream of the Rood and Bede's treatise on finger calculation). This chapter is followed by four chapters presenting larger-scale case studies of contrasting medieval cultural productions, in which Foys is able to apply his approach and explore its implications. The book ends with a reflective Epilogue that draws the strands of the argument together and provides room for some restrained crystal ball gazing.

Referring to Anglo-Saxon scholarship in the early modern period and in its later history, the first chapter shows how in mediating medieval culture print also "remediated" it, changing it through the application of a different representational model. Though maintaining the illusion of transparency in its representation of medieval material, print reconstructs it "as something deeply modern in condition and aspect" (6).The modern printed edition, in particular, is viewed by Foys as the "perfect paradigm" of remediation. The printed edition, in which "the medieval text now enters fully dressed in modern grammar and punctuation" (17), is "a conflation of medieval manuscript variants in a 'best text' that replaces both the technological medium and the textuality of the medieval with that of the modern" (19). Observing that digital culture will fundamentally change both the tools and the epistemology of Anglo-Saxon studies, Foys ends the chapter by setting up a key theme of the discussion in subsequent chapters, arguing that digital technology now offers the prospect of recovering "aspects of the Anglo-Saxon world that have remained unaccounted for in print" (34-35).

The following chapters examine particular cultural products from, or having associations with, Anglo-Saxon England, and introduce aspects of New Media theory to suggest new ways of understanding these products. The particular cultural products discussed are: Anselm's Meditations, a collection that Foys views, in its "permeability," its non-linearity and its aim of linking to a (spiritual) world beyond the text, as a kind of hypertext, with the reader deciding how much or which parts of the text to read in order to be led to prayer; the Bayeux Tapestry, with its "missing end" frustrating the desire for closure, another creation that Foys understands in digital terms, drawing attention to its combination of linear and spatial narrative; the Anglo-Saxon mappamundi in the eleventh-century manuscript Cotton Tiberius B. v, which, underpinning his analysis with an alert discussion of cartographical theory, Foys describes as medieval multimedia, having a spatial as well as a textual mode; and the Anglo-Scandinavian Nunburnholme Cross, a sculpture, now damaged to the point of near unintelligibility, that was worked upon by three or more sculptors in different styles and to different purposes over a period of a century and a half. In a brilliant discussion of this last object, Foys demonstrates its multicultural content and the changing nature of its existence in time; it is an object that itself encodes historical and social change, and had a role in defining the space of Anglo-Scandinavian settlement. Given its resistance to traditional print-based scholarly approaches, Foys also presents the Cross as a prime candidate for digital representation and analysis.

This brief and oversimplifying summary of Foys's analytical chapters does not do justice to the richness and precision of scholarship evident in his treatment. These ambitious and wide-ranging chapters are brimming with ideas, and even without their digital Leitmotif would be seen as original scholarly contributions of a high order. It is the insights with reference to New Media that give the book its distinctiveness, however, insights that Foys develops it in two aspects: he views pre-print culture in terms of post-print structurings (e.g., presenting medieval texts as hypertexts) and he suggests new scholarly possibilities that New Media make available. The former aspect provides a metaphor, of course, rather than revealing a literal identity, and it should be said that there are also striking similarities between pre-print and print representation, as well as between pre-print and digital representation.