ABSTRACT
Digitization can also be read as ‘activating the resources’, not just of languages but of vision, screenic sensoria, and knowledge. Using these tropes to deepen our understanding of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 41 and 286 as powerfully transformative and performative texts, one can see how digitization activates new forms of presence, visibility, and meaning that echo and extend the ways in which the books were received, transmitted, and appropriated as manuscripts in medieval Britain. On some genuinely basic level, CCCC 41 can be read as telling the story of the arrival of CCCC 286, the ‘Augustine Gospels’, in England. But CCCC 41 does not merely tell, it also shows and performs the effects of what CCCC 286 did there: convert reigning kings and their peoples to Christianity. CCCC 41 appears to be the largest surviving vernacular manuscript copied in the first quarter of the eleventh century in England.
