SINCE THE ADVENT of the “New Philology,” medieval studies have been through an era of renovatio. In the words of R. Howard Bloch, medievalists have confronted “tradition through renewal, rather than repeal. This time of renewal has become a key part of how we have dealt with the realm of the digital: its technologies, tools, and methodologies. In this book, we confront how those researching and teaching the Middle Ages traverse this realm, negotiating the “virtual divide” between the cultural artefacts that they study and the digital means by which they address those artefacts before presenting them to a variety of audiences. Part of this negotiation between digital and non-digital objects or subjects of study involves re-thinking and re-evaluating the ways that currently practicing medievalists develop their professional skills; this in turn will allow our community to reassess the ways in which the next generation of medievalists are educated. Although expressed through the perspective of the contributing medievalists, with their discipline-specific concerns, this book could thus also be perceived as a response to a rapidly evolving academic world. Rather than treating the digital humanities as its own discipline, the chapters in this volume examine it as a maturing methodology that increasingly intersects with field-specific curricula, boosted in turn by an upward surge in job searches looking for scholars who not only know digital tools, but who also, more importantly, understand technology as something other than an application.

Thus, many of the articles in this book treat the “book form” as one of the successful technologies for delivering texts and images, along the lines argued by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair in Hermeneutica. Several directly tackle the issue of the importance of the medium of transmission, questioning whether we can ever separate text or image from the technology that presents or displays them. They characterize the inner workings of both the analogue and digital as transformative and interpretive methods of delivering a text or image each with their own unique affordances, and pose challenging questions about the exegetical impact of any given medium. Just like the analogue, the digital is embedded and “materializes” in a context, is open to manipulation and exploration, and can fail in interesting ways.