“A new seminar this semester, Medieval Manuscripts to New Media: Studies in the History of the Book, invites Yale College students to explore how contemporary digital literary culture intersects with medieval manuscript culture—and can challenge preconceptions about the psychology of readers both past and present. Co-taught by Associate Professor Jessica Brantley and Assistant Professor Jessica Pressman of the Department of English and with extensive support from the Collaborative Learning Center under the direction of Barbara Rockenbach and Robin Ladouceur, the course calls on a variety of technologies to help students find new ways of interpreting medieval and contemporary texts and to inform their own creative and critical processes.

Operating as a “collaboratory” (emphasizing collaboration within a laboratory environment where new ideas are valued and an experimental approach to the technologies is fostered), the seminar is making ample use of resources at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Library. Using manuscripts and Kindles, the archives and digital software, students in the course will conduct close readings and formally innovative analyses of medieval and digital texts. A course-specific blog supported by Yale’s Instructional Technology Group is an integral component of the collaborative process, providing a forum in which students post reading responses, questions, links of interest, and other feedback to complement and supplement the time spent in class and in the archives. Weekly topics range from the concept of authorship to the way that form (roll, codex, book, screen, and others) influences perceptions of textuality, encouraging members of the seminar to challenge conceptions of authorship, reading, and texts. Throughout the course, technical support is readily available to help students make the most of the resources and media available to them.

The idea for the coursewas born when Brantley (a scholar of Old and Middle English literatures and manuscript studies) and Pressman (specializing in 20th-21st century American literature and digital literature) discovered surprising common ground in their interest in pushing the boundaries of the “book” beyond those implied by print culture. Although their areas of study are seemingly divergent, the two professors found themselves asking many of the same theoretical questions: What is an author? What is reading? What is a book? From these fundamental yet crucially important questions—and with support from the English department, Yale’s libraries, and the Collaborative Learning Center and Instructional Technology Group—the course’s students are spending the next three months rethinking and reenvisioning the act of reading by recognizing the technologies through which we read.” [source: "Multimedia Course Challenges Students to Rethink the Act of Reading"]

For more information about this course, please visit the links provided below:

Yale Daily News Article

Yale College Article

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below (note a slight delay upon initial playback):

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