ABSTRACT
There are many ways in which the late twentieth-century computer fulfils desires for artificial mental abilities that scholars have expressed since the Renaissance, and considerably earlier than that. This chapter will offer a quick survey of some of them, then concentrate on issues surrounding textual embodiment: to what extent does the onset of the digital era reawaken anxieties about the relationship of texts to authors and audiences that surfaced in connection with the invention and dissemination of movable type from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries? In what ways might the computer actually undo some of the alienation between authors and audiences brought about by the invention of printing? In many instances, the computer bridges the gap between manuscript and print. As has often been noted, the computer reinvests texts with the shape-shifting potential of early modern manuscript materials, which can be customized for individual users, reshaped and annotated at the user-owner’s will and desire. At the same time, however, the computer also preserves the rapid reproducibility enabled by the early printing press, in that it allows its user to ‘publish’ multiple identical copies of a text in a form he or she would like to disseminate. Moreover, the computer permits quick access to and retrieval of materials, and thus fulfills the same function as the late medieval and early modern florilegium and commonplace book. Amidst the water-moving machines, mills, saws for wood and marble, excavators, portable bridges, and other inventions described in Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine de Capitano Agostino Ramelli (Paris, 1588), Ramelli, a military engineer in the service of
Henry III of France, describes and illustrates a book wheel that holds from twelve to twenty large folio volumes; it is cleverly ‘constructed so that when the books are laid in its lecterns they never fall or move from the place where they are laid even when the wheel is turned and revolved all the way around’ (Gnudi and Ferguson: 1976, 508. See also Grafton: 1997, 59), making the required volumes almost instantly available for easy consultation. (See Figure 1.) Similar wheels were actually in use, and were particularly recommended for those suffering from the gout and for lawyers.
