He might borrow a friend's book and copy new material from it - much as computer users today may download interesting files, software, and games to their hard drives, and share them with friends, thinking nothing of the implications of copyright law. An individual reader might own a book into which he copied his own favorite romances, short poems, histories, and word play, trying out his own literary experiments in the margins. It was virtually impossible to be a reader without also being a writer in fact, from the errors many monastic copyists made, we can infer that they may have learned, physically, to write before being able to really read. While medieval monks did not have the powerful copying technology we possess today, their literary and scholarly production was based on copying, on the physical work of reproducing manuscripts, and this heavily influenced their aesthetics. In contrast, medieval literary aesthetics were based on the more fluid media of handwritten books (manuscripts) and the oral literature of traveling storytellers. Certainly, print vastly increased the number of readers, but it gradually stifled the individual creativity of casual authors and those not anointed by publication it canonized the primacy of text over pictures and made it more difficult to integrate the two in visually interesting ways and it imposed arbitrary distinctions (through layout, design, paper quality, and format) among genres and between "high" and "low" culture. The author's relationship to his or her work became one of ownership, and a gulf opened between the creator and the consumer of culture. With the advent of the printing press around 1450, the printer became, with a royal stamp of approval, the original capitalist: a small businessperson who owned the press, employed labor to do physical work, and produced near-identical products in quantity. Print aesthetics are bound up in capitalist economics: We speak of intellectual capital and intellectual property. Some wealthier members of medieval society even had laptops - traveling altars that folded up like books, or prayer books which contained private devotional images - so that they would never find themselves out of touch. Medieval neo-Platonists imagined a mediating mystical intelligence or "Nous" between God and man that we might see as a sort of collective wired consciousness. Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today. This system of monasteries was the original Internet, albeit at fractional baud. Among monasteries, news traveled faster and more efficiently (when not disrupted by invasions) than we might imagine. Imagine a medieval network of monasteries (and later, universities) as "nodes" of learning, text copying, cultural creation, and exchange of a wide variety of material, all using the universal language of Latin. On the cusp of a new aesthetic sensibility fueled by a ground swell of decentralized creativity, we might do well to look to the past for clues to our future. Medieval times may seem to be only escapist fodder for video adventure games or quasi-occult techno shamanism - but there's more. Despite its ultramodern, high-tech allure, digital culture is reflected - as in a glass darkly - in the monastery culture and manuscript aesthetics of the Middle Ages.
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