Saga - 2010, Page 97

Abstract
dav íð ólaf s son
T H e T e X T I N T H e A G e o F M e C H A N I C A L R e P R o D U C T I o N
Post-medieval Manuscript Culture: Research and Re-evaluation
The historiography of written communication in the early modern and modern
era has long been defined by the advent and spread of the printed book in the
Western world. The half-millennium since the invention of the movable-type
press has thus been seen as the age of mechanical reproduction of written mater-
ial, to borrow from the title of Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay, “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. However, as this article relates,
that attitude has given way during the last two decades or so, with post-medieval
manuscript studies coming into being as a cross-disciplinary field of study in var-
ious countries, including Iceland.
The article explores the development of international scholarship in the field
of early modern and modern manuscript culture, from the works of Harold Love
and other students of english literary history in the mid-1990s up to what is to
now becoming the established revisionist view of the subject, apparent in the
recent writings of renowned scholars such as the French cultural historian Roger
Chartier. The rise of interest in Icelandic scholarship during this same period in
post-Reformation texts that were not published in printed form has brought
greater attention to the long-recognized persistence of manuscript culture in
Icelandic. It is argued, however, that these studies have failed to put into focus the
cultural phenomenon of post-medieval manuscript culture as such, and its place
within the larger sphere of textual culture. Moreover, these studies have by and
large fallen short in not recognizing that the continuing usage of the manuscript
medium was in fact an international phenomenon, albeit employed by different
people and in different contexts from one country to another.
Drawing from this and my own recent studies in the field, I propose what I
call a poly-media approach towards the history of communication in the age of
print, emphasizing the coexistence and interaction of different media; manuscript,
print and oral or semi-oral transmission.
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