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.

This book has argued that it was weak state capacity and the absence of competitive mass political parties that the Second Republic inherited which severely limited the possibilities of its success. As Juan Linz has noted, weak state capacity can create problems of efficacy, or the ability of governments to find adequate solutions to resolve basic demands, as well as a lack of effectiveness in policy implementation. Land reform is an excellent example because it failed to resolve the problems of the landless, leading to frustration among a large section of rural society, while providing a platform for an even larger group to organize against the Republic.