"Old Media and the Medieval Concept successfully brings the richness of premodern 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, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"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