History of Text Technologies Book Series
Palgrave’s History of Text Technologies series will be dedicated to major works of new scholarship and theory in the area of the history of the book. Like much of the most exciting work in textual studies for the last quarter century, it builds upon D.F. McKenzie’s call for a “sociology of texts.” But this new series moves from the analysis of texts as material objects to the analysis of texts as material agents. The History of Text Technologies series is committed to the recognition that texts cannot be separated from the various and changing technologies through which those texts are created and then do the cultural work that texts do. This recognition does not insist on technological determinism; although individual volumes and authors may stake out their own positions, the series itself does not take sides on debates about whether the printing press was or was not an “agent of change” (Eisenstein). But the series would programmatically focus on change rather than stability: changes in technology, changes in culture, and the changing relationship between the two.
Text technologies have historically been irresistibly invasive and transformative. Unlike most areas of humanities research, this field is not limited to a particular nationality, language, or geographical area. “The technologizing of the word,” as Walter Ong called it in Orality & Literacy, is best understood as the multi-millennial evolution and dispersal of increasingly complicated, comprehensive, and multi-sensory artificial memory systems, which have driven human cultural evolution. Those memory machines, because they are prosthetic, are proximity engines, recording some part of a culture in a portable form, which can then be transmitted and translated into another culture. Travelers like Marco Polo and John Smith could record their own transnational experience in text-packages, which then traveled even more extensively than they had. Texts are travelers, pioneers, immigrants, and founding fathers. The text that has influenced European and American culture more than any other, “The Book,” the Bible, migrated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin and then into every European and most native American vernaculars. Texts are time-traveling technologies, too, or “time portals” (Roach 2005): they can connect two cultures separated by time as well as space. Through texts, Dante could feel a profound personal relationship to Virgil, who had been dead for more than a thousand years, and Montaigne could write one of the most powerful expressions of his own individuality through an essay “On some verses of Virgil.” The study of text technologies thus is the ideal engine of interdisciplinary transformation and integration in the humanities, because those technologies cross the boundaries that separate nations, ethnicities, and religions. Against the fragmenting of the humanities into ever-smaller identity categories, this series studies the mechanisms by which inherited identities are connected and transformed.
Those mechanisms are not only material, economic, and political, but also aesthetic. As they enable, exploit, extend, transform, or stand as obstacles to, certain aesthetic possibilities, text technologies are inevitably also aesthetic technologies. They create media platforms which shape, and are shaped by, evolving and contested generic categories and aesthetic imperatives. The collector’s interest in the medieval illuminated manuscript, the Dürer print, or the seventeenth-century French folio as an objet d’art in its own right, regardless of its intellectual content, mirrors the bibliographer’s interest in artisanal routines and material products of the book trade, epitomized by Randall McLeod’s refusal to “read” the texts he analyzes. But books in this series will "read," in the broadest sense, material texts as forces acting on the works and on their full cultural contexts. Thus, one of our key goals in the series would be to identify scholarship that emphasizes how the history of the forms of texts is also a history of human culture in its largest sense, a history that speaks to how we use texts to establish ways of thinking, means of knowing, practices of living, understandings of identity, and definitions of “the beautiful.”
The HoTT series will invite important new humanities scholarship informed by traditional book history. This will include work that derives from material and analytic bibliography, paleography and epigraphy, history of authorship, history of reading, study of manuscript and print culture, history of media, but our focus will be on scholarship that takes that more familiar knowledge in new direction and applies it in new ways. The initial historic framework for the series will be pre-modern texts: volumes in the series might include work on such topics as medieval illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance cartography, the transmissions and translations of Arabic texts up through Andalusia of the Spanish convivencia into early modern universities, the silk roads of the late medieval book trade, or the travels of the book in colonial New Spain. This historic focus would not, however, be a turn to the past. Rather, we would seek out scholarship that provides a frame for understanding the consequences of both globalism and technology in the circulation of texts, ideas, and human culture. Moreover, we are equally interested in the ways that post-modern digital and multi-media technologies are transforming our understanding of pre-modern textual culture.