quick iPad roundup

As you are undoubtedly well aware, Steve Jobs unveiled the newest Apple money-suck toy product on Wednesday: the iPad. The most immediate response was to its tone-deaf name. I don't actually find feminine hygiene products to be disgusting, but it's hard not to laugh at jokes about iTampons or iKotex. That last joke really works best with medievalists; for everyone else, you need to spend so long explaining what a codex is, that the frog has been dissected and dead long before they know what to laugh at. But even aside from menstrual jokes, the best joke I've seen comes from a medievalist. Tom Elrod's blog post, "Introducing the iCodex," captures the breathless adoration of Steve Jobs's fans and the rediscovery of reading technology.

 

This image from the blog captures what's smart and funny about it, as does this excerpt:

With the iCodex, people can now store multiple items in one, easy-to-use package. A user could, for example, enjoy both cooking recipes and psalms, or mappa mundi and instructions on marital relations. Since the iCodex's pages are bound together in an easy-to-turn format, things stored at the end of an iCodex are as easy to access as the beginning.

You need to go read the whole thing in full to appreciate it. Go, I'll wait here.

After that, when you're ready for some serious responses to the iPad, check out Alex Payne's response, which focuses on the iPad not as an e-book, but as a very small and slick personal computer. As an e-book it might work well, but in a way that disturbs Payne deeply: "The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine." As he goes on to discuss, turning a notebook into a tool for consumption rather than creation has implications for the future of hacking and programming and, I would argue, for the ways in which familiarity with computer languages retreats even further into the hands of a small few. Payne's argument is worth considering, especially in light of what I discussed in my last post about the ability to create mash-ups, whether in book form or in music. Consumption is great, but it's creation that makes a technology stick and a culture grow. (On the flip side of Payne's argument, Daniel Tenner praises the iPad for exactly these features: Apple is "making a slick “uncomputer” that’s tailored to those people who don’t actually need a computer.")

A couple of last notes: I found most of these posts through Twitter, thanks to @MagBaroque, @academicdave, and @briancroxall. Finally, the jokes connecting computers and medieval books have been around for a while. I've posted this before, and many of you will have already seen it, but I still love it, so I leave you with the Medieval Help Desk:

more on medieval books

Since in his most recent post, Got Medieval has included my brief thoughts on why books should be one of words when defining "The Middle Ages in Seven Words (or less)", I thought I would flesh out my earlier post a bit.

For me, there are two equally important parts in the question of whether books are medieval: what are books and what is medieval?

For most people, I'd hazard, "book" means something in print, made from moveable type or from the computer software equivalent thereof. It's something that is printed and exists in multiple printed copies. (I'd actually go further, and say that for most people, "book" means something that is made and sold by a publishing company, rather than a vanity press. If someone says, "I wrote a book!", I think we assume that it will be bought and sold, not that it's languishing in our bottom shelves or that we paid for the cost of its printing and distribution. There's another post lurking in our future about the practices of publication and what buying and selling means for books.)

In that sense, books are something that came about after 1455--that is, after Gutenberg printed his bible. We might think that that is a bit late for something defining the Middle Ages. But books should also be thought of in terms of their form. A book is a codex, organized by stiching together loose leaves (usually of parchment or paper) in a fixed order. We are so used to this format that it often passes unnoticed. But the transition from scroll to codex (a transition lasting centuries that was nearly complete by 400 AD) was a major technological shift, one that was at least as transformative as the transition (still not complete) from manuscript to print.

In other words, while we might associate manuscripts most strongly with the Middle Ages, many of those manuscripts are also books. In that sense, I would say that books are indeed medieval.

The other half of the question--what is medieval--is not easily answered (as made evident in the many responses that Got Medieval records). For many people today, "medieval" simply means something primitive and out of date and possibly violent. If you want to lazily dismiss something as ridiculously backwards, you could label it medieval. In contrast to this vision of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is the beginning of all things civilized: perspective painting, print, anatomy, subjectivity, colonialism . . . This simplistic binary falls in line with the equally simplistic binary of manuscript equalling error-riddled and ancient and print equalling fixed, standardized, and modern.

To this, I would respond that print is not as stable as we typically assume, and that it was partricularly variable in its early years of printing. Nor should we assume that manuscripts are automatically riddled with mistakes. To link medieval only with manuscripts and Renaissance only with books reinforces that false divide in both binaries.

At some point in the future I'll do a post about early printed books and contemporaneous manuscripts so we can think about how very much printed books owe to manuscript books. For now, though, I'll just leave with the observation that if you google "medieval books" what you get in response are sites about medieval manuscript books. Some of them are very good. But that response overlooks the much more complicated relationship between books and manuscript and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Not that I would ever suggest that Google misleads us--just check out Google Penance . . .

medieval books

Over on the wonderful blog Got Medieval is a discussion about what terms define the medieval period and about the slipperiness between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What are the seven terms that define the Middle Ages? According to Got Medieval's students, "knights, things found on or around knights, and peasants" (my summary really doesn't do that classroom exercise justice; it's well worth reading). Got Medieval offers his own list, based on his tag cloud: "Beowulf, King Arthur, Marginalia, Manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, Popes, and Latin."

A recurring feature on the blog is "Mmm... Marginalia", a highly entertaining look at medieval marginalia. I certainly wouldn't want to argue that marginalia or manuscripts should not be strongly associated with the medieval period. But what about books?

The first book printed with moveable type was Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, completed in 1455. Given the complexity of the task, it's likely that Gutenberg began experimenting with moveable type in the 1440s. Is that the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in Mainz?

I'm not quibbling with Got Medieval's list, or with the other lists that commentators devised (some of which do mention books on their list of defining traits of the period). But I do want to pause on that question of whether books are medieval. That split between medieval & manuscript versus renaissance & book reveals a great deal about how we conceptualize not only the two historical periods but also the traits of manuscripts and books.

More posts on that in the future. In the meantime, admire different copies of Gutenberg's Bible at the British Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Gottingen Library, and the Library of Congress.

UPDATE: Got Medieval fans: see my newest post updating this one!