Week 11: Chill out

My first reaction to this question was to just sigh, and figure that if I traveled back in time to say, 1400 (manuscript production is great, printing is not too far off in the future), and got around the pesky issue of my being an outspoken woman, was that I would have to tell the monks to relax, books would be around forever.

But then thinking about it more in depth, if I were to go to the height of book production, and explain to these monks that they would be confronted the printing press, where you could make multiple identical copies of a book almost instantly, they would be just as confused as if someone actually did take Ashley's suggestion, go to 1990, and then say that all the information in the world could be held in your hand.

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY JOB SECURITY?

But looking at this in even more depth, as anyone who went to the Erik Kwakkel Friends of Fisher lecture about Medieval Commercial Books remembers, book production was leaving the monastery and entering the commerical sphere in university towns already. Life for the medieval monk (in England, let's say) was secure until the Reformation.

Let me tell you, buddy, things are about to change.

But back to the Future of the Book for the medieval monk. The medieval monk's concerns, along with Saints, and The Big Guy Upstairs (e. g. God), were that their books be produced and then kept as treasures. After all, some libraries were chained, and books that were made for rich patrons took months to produce!

I would probably tell them that their biggest challenge would not be that the book would disappear, but that their conception of the book as a precious object that exists as a singular object would change. If your monastery has the only copy of, say, Peter Lombard, for miles, and other scholars come to visit you, this means that once the printing press starts making lots of copies of Peter Lombard, you no longer have something special.

I would advise them to be comfortable with being flexible in their ideas and their ideologies. This will not only help them to change when the printing press gets introduced, but also to be able to flex when the Reformation completely changes their role in society.

So maybe the monks can't relax. But I see a parallel between their situation at the dawn of the printing press, and our situation in the post-dawn of the electronic book. Flexibility is key--if we stay rigid and refuse to change, we'll break under the stress. (After a whole course on this, it seems obvious to me, but this remains the advice I would give.)

Medieval Manuscripts and the manuscript tradition petered out by 1600. Does that mean that by 2100, our print books will become oddities, and then antiquities, and then disappear? Maybe. The recent rise of art books and fine press books on the Gaspereau Press model certainly illustrates the book moving towards the "objet d'art" area, but the fact that there is still a relatively healthy industry to make pulp romances and detective novels shows that the book is far from dead.

I guess, in the end, for us, as well as the monks, I would recommend that we just RELAX, keep an open mind, and go with the flow. Some things are just so far in the future for us that we won't be able to comprehend them. Just as Brother Example Monk would not even be able to comprehend the idea of universal information held in your hand (or could he? At that time the Bible was universal information!) there is probably something looming out there that our puny 21st century mindset can't deal with. In the end, the best thing for everyone involved to do is to just accept it. Que sera sera, and just as we are still able to look at medieval manuscripts today, our books will probably still be around in some format 600 years from now.