So here's how it went. I’m walking into Harvard Yard on a summer's day, as a rather plump, entirely bald male is walking towards me. I do not recognize him. I cannot, however, help noticing that the person coming towards me exhibits, in very low level and understated form, signs of having recognized me. There is, I intuit, something in his eye movement that expresses greeting. This is always a troubling social predicament. One is caught in a dilemma we have all experienced: either one will be thought rude, if one does not respond to the manifested signs of recognition; or, if one does respond, one runs the risk of being thought slow-witted, on discovering, to one's acute embarrassment, that one had misread those tiny, ambiguous signs of possible recognition – the minuscule eye movements of a complete stranger had not meant “hello” after all.

“After all” is in fact an exaggeration in such circumstances, since encounters of this kind happen in real time, as two creatures approach each other, both walking at brisk pace, from a distance of only two or three yards. With only a couple of seconds available, one's judgment goes into overdrive, but mine wasn't coming up with a decision in time. The apparent stranger, however, released me from this mini-agony.

The dénouement: as we are about to pass beyond each other, the apparent stranger breaks out into a broad smile. Suddenly there is no ambiguity: within a millisecond I stop observing and start recognizing: this is my friend John, who has been absent from campus for many months undergoing chemotherapy.

John had been trim, with plenty of hair, when last I saw him, just before he went in for treatment. “John!” I exclaimed as we warmly shook hands and enjoyed our mutual relief, not to say joy. John was perhaps happy to be back in the land of the living, but I was much more than happy: that sudden flash of my friend's smile transformed everything in an instant – it transformed one quick moment of embarrassment into blissful cognitive certainty; and it transformed months of uncertainty about the fate of my friend into the joy that here he was, fully alive and present. Not least, it transformed observation into recognition.

History bears witness to the cataclysmic effect on society of inventions of new media for the transmission of information among persons. The development of writing and later the development of printing are examples.

The “Gutenberg Revolution” served as a touchstone for western intellectuals during much of the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the decades of the Cold War. The standard account, popularized by scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, tells a familiar march-of-progress narrative, in which the invention of printing happily launched western Europe into an era of intellectual, political, religious, and economic achievement. Scholars of European and global premodernity, however, never accepted the oversimplifications of this potted history, and chafed both at its assumptions about the unequivocally positive effects of the new medium and especially at all it incuriously projects onto earlier centuries, which in popular and learned accounts have been obliged, once again, to represent the darkness before the dawn of modernity.

Today we inhabit a world of temporal mirroring: for the past three decades we have been immersed in another revolution “of new media for the transmission of information” on an effectively global scale, like a vast cultural experiment taking place in real time. This unprecedentedly rapid new revolution demands a reassessment of the pieties and prejudices associated with the information-technology revolution of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by seeking a deeper awareness of the counter-currents characteristic of such moments of dramatic cultural change, including “the cataclysmic effect on society” of the new order.

The 1990s digital revolution was thought to generate, as the print revolution and its contemporary, the Protestant Reformation, is still often claimed to have generated, the unqualified good of more readers with access to vastly wider ranges of reading material. The unmediated reading of scripture, for example, finds its parallel in the immediate access to digital information. Paeans to the digital revolution still ring with the unqualified confidence of John Foxe’s praise of the printing press in Acts and Monuments, whereby “knowledge groweth, judgement increaseth, bookes are dispersed … stories be opened, times compared, truth decerned, falsehode detected.”

The optimism of the first phase of the digital revolution was not wholly unfounded.

THE INVESTIGATION OF relations between animality and manuscript materiality in Sarah Kay's meticulous contextualisation of bestiary production, Animal Skins, evidently draws on and advances her earlier explorations of the shape and nature of subjectivity, whether understood as embodied or as dependent on the second skin(s) of language and text for its contouring and sensations. All the time attentive to specificities of illustration, ordering, and wording in particular manuscript versions, Animal Skins illuminates both long-standing traditions and immediate contexts, situating the bestiary's handling of nature in relation to educational practices and currents in thought. Through this, Kay's work targets the recto–verso complexities of the gospel word according to our dumb neighbours: ‘Being animal is both good news and bad for humans, for in the animal their identity is both lost and found.’ Animal skins materially support instruction that is, in the words of Thomas of Chobham, ‘useful to us in the body, but also […] useful in the soul’, therefore defining and refining humanity; but at the same time they ‘shape readers’ understanding by the constant, if silent, challenge to rethink the grounds of their identity’ (Animal Skins: 156). As with the songbirds of Parrots and Nightingales – creatures testifying to the insistence of language, poetry especially, either welling up from inside or witlessly repeated – the trouble between animality and human subjectivity finds a mirror in the parchment page's conjunction of beast and book. In this context, the animal materiality underpinning medieval textual cultures – whether concretely as books or as an intellectual and imaginative framework – appears simultaneously mute and eloquent, gifted through human agency with something akin to a voice otherwise thoughtlessly denied in the ordinary run of exploitation.

By exploring the bestiary's dialectical engagement with human exceptionalism, Animal Skins and its related studies offer rich insights into the uncertain terrains that readerly intuition and apprehension negotiate or are given to occupy. Such a focus also reflects Kay's previous engagements with the function of contradiction (in both topical logic and Marxism) and the unconscious as both spaces for and challenges to thinking.

The Second Republic sparked considerable enthusiasm concerning the possibilities that a large-scale permanent redistribution of landed property could resolve the social problems in southern Spain. Yet, as this chapter argues, land reform failed because there was insufficient uncultivated land that could be brought under the plough, and labour-intensive agriculture was not feasible under dry-farming conditions. Indeed, cereal cultivation was becoming increasingly capital intensive, especially on the heavy, fertile Campiña soils. The slow and limited progress of settlements under the 1932 Reform Law contrasts with the land invasions in the spring of 1936, which resulted in over a hundred thousand peasants receiving almost immediately over half a million hectares. However they failed to solve the overriding problem of insufficient land and, because weak state capacity implied that land settlements could not be implemented impartially, they simply changed which authority decided who was to benefit, and who was to be excluded.