Can You Become "Fluent" in "AI"?

No. But the Ohio State University says that its students are required to pursue this goal if they want to receive their degree.

Time was when engineers, linguists, and psychologists wanted to create programs modeled on human cognition and speech. In fact, three quarters of a century later, that time is still now, as thousands, if not millions, of poorly paid contract laborers across the globe are being exploited--arguably abused--to train large language models for commercial firms. The idea, to put it broadly, is to create a program that could speak human fluently. 

Which all makes the Ohio State University’s new initiative in "AI Fluency" so strange. I am not a linguist or a cognitive psychologist, so I'm unable here to speak to the concept of "fluency" itself, a complex and no doubt deeply contested one. What I'm interested in here is the use of "fluency" in this marketing campaign and the perverse use of this metaphor to sell this now compulsory program at a public, state university.

According to their website

 Ohio State is leading a bold, groundbreaking initiative to integrate artificial intelligence into the undergraduate educational experience. The initiative will ensure that every Ohio State student, beginning with the class of 2029, will graduate being AI fluent — fluent in their field of study, and fluent in the application of AI in that field.

 Ravi V. Bellamkonda Executive Vice President and Provost of OSU, is quoted on the same webpage as saying that all OSU students will "become 'bilingual,'" frankly a galling use of the term given that bilingualism itself has been nearly criminalized, as Americans are being targeted by ICE just because they're heard speaking Spanish...but I digress.

I wrote the term "perverse" above to describe how the metaphor of fluency is being used here. I find it perverse for two reasons. First, because it commits to an anthromorphizing fallacy: one does not "speak" or become "fluent" in AI any more than one can speak and become fluent in refrigeration. (And all of this begs the question of why someone needs to spend a semester learning how to use commercial software that is designed to be easy enough for a crocodile to use.) Second, the use of fluency here folds back on itself the very goal that the engineers of "AI" are attempting to achieve, which is to make algebra speak human.

 As with literally everything in life, Star Trek TNG provides great wisdom here.

In the episode, "Hero Worship," we meet Timothy, a traumatized young boy who has lost his whole family in a cataclysm suffered by their ship. Over the course of the episode we see Timothy suppressing his trauma by adopting Data's mannerisms and deciding that he wants to be an Android, just like Data. Because this is television, the episode takes us neatly through the arc of discovering what happened to Timothy's ship and the acute cause of his trauma (he thought he was responsible for the destruction after he accidentally knocked a computer panel), and eventually, though the help of Data's and Troi's counseling, he decides he wants to be a boy again.

 American universities have been beset by rolling waves of blunt force trauma over the last four decades. I think we can take a cue from TNG and decide that wanting to become fluent in a "neural net" modeled on human cognition that itself remains incompletely understood is folly. And maybe if more Americans watched TNG, they'd know how foolish this is.

"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History

The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself. 

It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on Apple's "Crush" commercial), but especially now among the hustlers of "AI." The argument goes: just as Gutenberg's invention freed the minds of fettered and unlettered medieval Europeans, launching them into modernity, so "artificial intelligence" technology will elevate humanity to a higher plane of being. Forget about the ecological costs, forget about the expropriated labor, forget about the surveillance, forget about the reduction of social interaction and negotiation to calculation and prediction from the lowest common denominator of number crunched text. What matters is that history is a series of stages of revolutions, in which a sequence of technologies lead humans toward exceeding our own limitations. One day we will be Multivac.

 It's not difficult to dispute this lazy, analogic use of history. Lemme see if I can excavate the formula from the primordial part of my brain that retains stuff I learned for the SAT

printing press: democratized knowledge  :: "artificial intelligence" : ???

 The consequence on the other side of "AI" is rarely stated in concrete terms. Usually it's enough to say that because "the printing press democratized knowledge," AI will have a similarly beneficial effect. We see Sam Altman saying this and anyone acting as his surrogate now that they've bought it: whether it's Randy Weingarten justifying selling out public school teachers and students or start-ups crowing that they’re about to democratize music production.

 This phrase is everywhere. But while those opposed to the insertion of "AI" into every sector of life dispute that a text extrusion machine and racist pile of linear algebra can achieve anything so wonderful as its proponents use this analogy to proclaim, I have yet to see anyone in this context questioning the first formula in that analogy.

 So. To the phrase. "The printing press democratized knowledge."

Here's how I teach slogans that masquerade as history.

What, exactly are we talking about here? Is it the mechanical process of replicating by means of impressing an image or letter on to a surface? Because if that's the case, then the cylinder seals of ancient Mesopotamia "democratized knowledge." Forget about woodblock printing from Asia in the 8th century, humanity has had printed words for literally thousands of years.

So if it's not the mechanical process, is it the machine, the technology of the printing press and movable type itself? Well for that to be the case, then we would have to start talking about a whole host of other things because printed words on paper don't do anything sitting in a room by themselves unless you believe in magic. How about the production of paper, for one? But the words printed on those sheets of paper, they would have to go somewhere to be sold, so we probably want to talk about transportation infrastructure--roads, waterways, and all the vehicles and conveyances that trundled and floated over them. Once those words pressed on to paper ended up at their destinations, it wouldn't be very good at all if they didn't have literate people to read them. And it would have been real weird for some German businessmen to sink an absurd amount of money into creating a product for which there was no market. They had to learn to read from somewhere, and it wasn't a hulking machine in Mainz that immaculately birthed a literate customer base.

OK, OK, one says, but you know what I mean. The printing press MADE MORE BOOKS. It gave us SCALE!

But is that "democratization"? Democracy sounds so nice. I love it! But is that the appropriate term here? Democratization describes a political process of expanding the franchise and availing political representation to more and more people (the "demos"). We still need more of it here in the United States. We would do well to assist the process of democratization to the residents of Puerto Rico and Washington DC and to the formerly incarcerated and to those removed from voter rolls due to clerical error and “clerical error.” Clearly this literal definition is not what anyone means when they claim that the printing press achieved it, because the printing press has nothing to do with representative government.

What they mean here is that the printing press produced more units of certain class of commodity (words on paper) and made that commodity more affordable. As a result more people could own this commodity. Is this commodity "knowledge"? We'll get there in a sec. The issue is whether allowing more people to buy something is a democratizing process. I'm going to let people fill in a blank here because I will bet that you can think of things--some very terrible, violent things--that, when owned by more and more people actually thwart democracy.

Finally, to knowledge. It's ridiculous that I should try to dispatch the complexity of what "knowledge" is in three sentences, which is about the length of a paragraph that people are willing to stick with on a screen. I will simply say here that equating words pressed on to paper with knowledge both restricts what knowledge itself is and the vast number of channels by which humanity has acquired it over millennia (I, for one, didn't learn how to rollerblade by being taught from words pressed on paper), at the same time that it oversells what words on paper are (sure, everything is "knowledge," but when people use that word, they're generally dressing up whatever it is they're calling "knowledge" and I can assure you that a lot of what the printing press printed at scale was bullshit).  

No, I don't hate the printing press. What I object to is the use of slogans based on fairy tales. But "the printing press democratized knowledge" is not just a fairy tale; when you actually think about the words being used next to one another, they don't make the sense they are purported to make.

Yes, it’s important to dispute on its own terms that “AI” will achieve all the glorious things its boosters promise. But it’s also important to understand that the very historical example that is cited as proof by means of the precedent it set is itself a lie, largely because it makes no damned sense.

MOOCs and the Myth of "Access"

The recent piece by Vauhini Vara, “How Chatbots and AI Are Already Transforming Kid’s Classrooms” is important reading for the week, and there’s much in it to infuriate. It’s good.

But there’s one paragraph, arguably featuring the least enraging material, that I paused over because it’s a testament to how successful the tech industry has been in ensuring that the favorable language they use to frame and retail their products is the language we all use to describe them.

Vara writes

The outreach from Silicon Valley seems to follow a playbook developed during a decades-long attempt to turn public education into a market for private products. That effort has seen some high-profile failures: for instance, massive open online courses, which were supposed to expand access through web-based classes, and personalized learning regimes, which were supposed to use software to perfectly match students with material at their level. It has also included the enormously successful diffusion of screen-based education platforms such as Google Classroom. One lesson learned along the way is that school technologies rarely catch on without buy-in from teachers.

It’s deeply gratifying to read a journalist recalling the most recent colossal failure of the tech industry to “disrupt” education. That’s excellent. But it’s that bit I put in bold that we need to put pressure on, and only then can we start to become better advocates for ourselves as educators and (for those who aren’t educators) citizens who have a stake in all this, because our future depends upon the competencies and compassions of today’s students. And the tech industry is doing everything in its power to diminish that.

And so. That phrase I bolded: MOOCs "were supposed to expand access through web-based classes.” Sure, that’s one way of putting it. That’s certainly how they were sold. Another would be to say that their value proposition was for universities looking for new revenue streams. In that case, MOOCs weren’t about access. They were about expanding the market for education past what the physical structure of a university campus could accommodate and what the university was willing to pay for increasing the number of faculty to do the education. More students without the need for more classrooms, without the need for more professors.

No university went wild for MOOCs because they were excited about bringing ArtHist 101: Introduction to Art History to students in faraway places. They went wild because MOOCs were supposed to make them money, and for a fraction of the overheads.

That’s not “expanding access.” That’s creating and capturing a new market.

When vendors feed you language, it’s in the hopes that you’ll regurgitate it to sell their product for them. Like using an LLM to write for you, it’s easier than thinking for yourself.

Vara’s piece is good journalism and she’s obviously thinking for herself. My point is that all of us do this, all of us slip into canned phrases from time to time. The best we can do is audit those phrases, try to avoid them, and stay alert to the work that they do.

Will the Real Hildegard von Bingen Please Stand up? It's Replicas All the Way Down

A year ago, I received a fascinating email from a stranger. The stranger was a man who had recently traveled with his wife to visit family in Germany and had decided to visit Bingen with the expectation of seeing the original paintings made by Hildegard herself in the twelfth century. However, the man had found Hildegard to be "quite elusive!"

The paintings were nowhere to be found. There were backlit, enlarged reproductions of her paintings. But the original, twelfth-century works of art themselves were just..not there. He went on to write,

I asked the one attendant in the museum where are the originals? Her English was not very good, and my German is worse. In response to my repeated questioning, she kept pointing to the area of these reproductions saying "there, there, there they are." But those were not them.

The man left the museum with questions and searched the internet with no luck for answers. Hence, his email to me. Having found my name associated with Hildegard, as this was shortly after I published this article on the most famous manuscript of her magnum opus, Scivias, the man emailed me to see if I might help sort this matter out and offer some information to his question: "where are originals of Hildegard's paintings?"

I wrote back with what was sure to be a disappointing response:

 Dear ________,

 Although I have not visited the Museum am Strom, I suspect the paintings to which you're referring are those from the famous Scivias manuscript, which was not painted by Hildegard herself but rather is believed to have been produced under her supervision some time in the 1170s at the Rupertsberg Abbey.

 I'm sorry to say that this manuscript, which had been in the Wiesbaden Landesbibliothek until WWII, was placed in a bank vault in Dresden for safekeeping during the war. When an attempt was made to recover it, it had disappeared from that vault. Only one manuscript believed to have been produced under Hildegard's supervision (which lacks illustration) that was also placed in that vault was recovered. You can read the exciting story of its recovery here [in a great article by Jennifer Bain]:

 https://theconversation.com/how-two-women-pulled-off-a-medieval-manuscript-heist-in-post-war-germany-130179

 Regarding the reproductions you saw: a number of photographs of the original Scivias manuscript were produced in the early 20th century, and it is likely that you were seeing prints of those, which have been widely reproduced. Alternatively, if the reproductions you saw were in color, then they were taken from a hand-made replica (a facsimile) of the original manuscript that was made by nuns of Eibingen Abbey between 1927 and 1933. That facsimile is the subject of my Modern Language Quarterly article, the full text of which I attach here so you may learn more about its production.

 I am sorry to report the bad news about the disappearance of the original manuscript!

 Not long thereafter, the man responded to my email with a kind and engaging note that thanked me for my explanation and expressed the deep frustrations he experienced in his efforts just to be in the presence of some important works of art, works that he genuinely thought he could see. The internet, he said, is awash in confusing information about these artifacts. This is no doubt unaided by tourism boards that are rather coy about how many of them are replicas.

 In the year since this email exchange transpired I've returned to it in my mind to think about the stakes of replicas, of information and histories that become untethered from the reproductions that make up so much of our exposure to art and the artifacts of the Middle Ages that I study.

Rule One in the Intro to Art History class that I teach is: these things on the slides here are not the works of art that you're studying; they're digital copies of them. Incidentally, the most gratifying and annoying thing my students do after that is ask me for the dimensions of works of art when I've forgotten to include them on my slides. Gratifying because clearly my admonition was heeded; annoying because goddammit labeling things is a pain in the ass, and my neck already hurts from spending hours on my Powerpoints. Anyway, it's genuinely gratifying. But also my neck hurts.

I've never thought that interpretation or even enjoyment of art in reproduction can't be done. That would be ridiculous. I'd not be in this profession. But I do think that it's important to know and to teach people to develop an understanding of how knowledge itself gets made and lost when we come into contact with, when we look at reproductions.

The internet hasn't caused us to fall from a state of auratic grace. It's just accreted one more medium to the media, channeling media, channeling media that have always serialized originals (and yes, this precedes the printing press; for the love of God, please don't think this has anything unique to do with the printing press).

I love that this person reached out to me. I'm so glad he was appreciative of the conversation we had. A year after he contacted me, I'm still appreciating it too.

 Here are two replicas of replicas of replicas.

The Sympathetic Magic of Education Reform: Tech woo-woo

I enjoyed reading this week Neil Kraus’s The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (2023). The book’s core claim is that corporations and elites who subscribe to neoliberal tenets have promoted a narrative that has succeeded in becoming the conventional framework for addressing education reform. This framework he calls the “fantasy economy,” one in which there are abundant jobs but not sufficiently skilled and technologically educated graduates to fill them, as opposed to the real economy in which there is wage stagnation and rife underemployment. According to Kraus, “The fantasy economy's framing of economic inequality… focuses exclusively on education and intentionally deflects attention away from decades of public policies and changing business practices that have directly and indirectly contributed to stagnating wages for most while simultaneously producing extraordinary income and wealth gains for a small minority.” In short, corporate interests and the foundations that business elites have established to disseminate their ideology have promoted education reform as the solution to economic problems and inequality (which are not within the power of educational institutions to solve).

One thing came to mind as I was reading his book, and it’s the idea of sympathetic magic.

[Let’s leave The Golden Bough out of this if for no reason other than that I’ve never actually read it, but my second-hand knowledge of it is that as a work of 19th-century anthropology it’s full of the standard Victorian pretenses to rationalism that were part and parcel of the colonialist nous. I’m just thinking of sympathetic magic as a concept with a more common, colloquial currency, the belief that like causes like and, similarly, the remedy to an ailment resembles that ailment. If anyone has a better term for what this characterizes, let’s go for that. Woo-woo? Maybe that’s all this is. Tech woo-woo.]

For the last forty years we have been told that there is a high-tech global economy out there just pumping out new and exciting jobs, which American students simply cannot get because of failing secondary schools and a weak system of higher education. This claim is fallacious, those jobs are not there; instead we have underemployment and wage stagnation. Nevertheless, the solution proposed is always to introduce more technology into classrooms, to optimize, digitize, and technologize what we as educators do and the materials from which students learn. Despite the absolute failure of technology to have any positive impact on either educational or jobs outcomes, this has been the unchanging refrain for years.

Teaching with more digital tools does not exciting jobs in a high-tech global economy make. Nor would it do anything to prepare students for those jobs were they there. The most comical thing about promoting “tech readiness” among students is that it’s a legacy line from c1995 when it actually did take about half a day to get your Gateway 2000 up and running. It’s 2025, a caterpillar can figure out how to use apps.

Suggesting that there’s an app for education is not “innovation.”

It’s just sympathetic magic.

Tech woo-woo.

A Dictionary of "AI"

Even if you spend just a small amount of time listening to people who believe that any kind of digital technology (whether that’s “artificial intelligence” or not) is an unquestioned good, you’ll hear a set of terms used to frame the conversation. Most of these terms have become a common part of public discourse, and they comprise a standard vocabulary of accepted values. Often, when they are invoked, no one feels the need to follow up by asking what is being promised. A now-classic example: say something is “democratizing.” When someone says that the internet is “democratizing,” few will ask what that actually means and how the internet can achieve it.

Four decades of scholarship, from Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986) to David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-wing Politics of Digital Technology (2024) have shown how powerful rhetoric is in paving the way for certain technological regimes to determine the shape of our lives: not technology itself, but the language used to frame how people think and talk about technology.

It seems like we could do with a small dictionary that defines how this common vocabulary is being used by the proponents of “artificial intelligence.” So here it is.

*Update: with thanks to Joseph Potts and Peter Tarras for their contributions, I’ve added “empowering” and “tool” to the dictionary (August 27, 2025).

**Update: with thanks to Brendan Greeley for his contribution of “regulatory uncertainty” and to Emily Bender for her post on Bluesky reminding us all of the canard about technology moving fast. And while I’m here, if you want more in your anti-AI arsenal, read Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s excellent The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025) (August 28, 2025).

How to Read an "AI" Press Release

Every so often someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman will dribble out some unadorned text, announcing with stentorian certitude the advent of a new world that their latest product will avail. Zuck seems to love dressing up his thought bubbles in Times New Roman for the purposes of LARPing intellect, which I find funny and tragic.

I take an interest in this genre of bad copy not only because of the failure of journalists to report on its inanity, bullshit, and empty promises. I take an interest in it also because I’m writing a book on the relationship between the tech industry and the discipline of history: in particular how the stagist, teleological framing of the past that one finds in Dad History books (you know what I’m talking about: ones with titles like, How Thomas Edison Made the Modern World, or The Swerve) has served the argument that the next “stage” in human development will be led by a given technology invented by or pushed to the extreme of its potential by singular Great Men, in this case, “AI” in all its weird bastard forms. Bad history is the basis for the vision of the future being written by tech CEOS to sell their products.

Anyway, every time I read one of these very unserious sequences of predictable PR, I mentally annotate the nonsense, since journalists routinely fail to do it for all of us, which should be their job. But I had an hour to spare and a big cup of coffee, so, to exorcise this from my system, herewith: How to Read an “AI” Press Release. The title is deliberately ambiguous. Was this digested and regurgitated by a LLM from the massive cache of such press releases disguised as the Deep Thoughts of Visionary Bros? Who can tell? Original text that I’ve annotated is here.

That's Numberwang! On Quant Methods and Medieval Manuscripts.

When I lived in the UK I watched a lot of Mitchell and Webb. A British comedy duo who should be more famous among Americans than they are, they made sketches just the side of absurd where—unlike Monty Python—things never devolved into the annoyingly silly (or racist). They did a recurring sketch which, signature Mitchell and Webb, sent up both the subject of the sketch as well as the other comedy shows that sent up the topic in the past: the network television game show.

This is Numberwang, and it is one of my favorite things. 

The sketch features two contestants who alternate calling out arbitrary numbers until the host—Robert Webb as Chuck Woolery on uppers—calls out “That’s Numberwang!” before a new round of random number-calling begins. The comedy of the sketch relies on the two contestants, fully committing with studied gravity to the nonexistent logic of the game. Robert Webb’s sunny excitement as he rewards the correct number is the punctuation that pitches its absurdity into the comic.

Numberwang came to my mind when I read the most recent medieval manuscripts study making ripples online because of its promotion in Nature—this is a semi-regular event when medieval studies gets invited to the beach by science and enjoys a moment in the sun. 

The study ensues from a simple question. It asks: “What was the quantitative contribution of female scribes [to the production of manuscripts in Europe between 800 and 1600 CE] based on available sources? How large was the fraction of the manuscripts copied by women?” After citing some of the  historical research that has examined the work of female scribes in the Middle Ages the authors refer to the target of their research (how many were there?) as a “gap in the knowledge.” Strictly speaking, yes this is a gap in our knowledge: nobody knows know how many female scribes there were working in Europe between these years, nor do we do how many manuscripts they produced. But we don’t know how many male scribes were working during this period either, and when you put it like that it seems like a strange question to ask. 

This isn’t to say that quantitative analysis shouldn’t be done or can’t be useful. Looking at a narrow window of time in England and using financial records detailing the amount of wax that chancery scribes paid for as the basis for extrapolating how many sealed documents issued from the office of chancery per day: this strikes me as a really clever use of quantitative analysis based on pretty firm foundations (and it’s why Michael Clanchy had the well-deserved vaunted reputation he had).

But historical research is fun like this, and we can ask whatever questions we want even if skeptics like me can’t see the value of the question asked. If I had my druthers, I’d follow the lead of Linda Nochlin: I wouldn’t try to collect a full deck of female scribes to prove their place in history, inevitably coming up short; I’d inquire into the institutional conditions that impeded their access to the opportunities enjoyed by men, or I’d wonder about the nature of their training and how it differed from the educations afforded to their male counterparts; I’d ask about the criteria for success, who got to dictate that criteria, and whether elements of it were framed specifically to place the goalposts beyond what women’s training could reach.

Nevertheless, the authors are in search of numbers. So they approach an answer to their question by using what they call “bibliometric analysis” based on the data provided from colophons as contained in the multivolume Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVI e siècle compiled by the Benedictines of Bouveret between 1965 and 1982.

By definition, a colophon is a statement made within a book which contains details about the production of the book in which it’s found (this information could run the gamut from containing the names of everyone involved in the book’s production to the date and place of the book’s completion, alongside complaints by the scribe about what a long boring task it was; other colophons might only offer a date or a place or a single name). Colophons are notoriously cagey forms of historical evidence: sometimes scribes copied them verbatim from their exemplars (the books they were copying), and this even occurred when scribes copied by hand printed books. It’s very fun finding a manuscript that announces in  handwritten ink where it was printed. Moreover, the impetus to include a colophon was often not present, and swathes of manuscripts produced in the Middle Ages (most of them, in fact) contain no such information at all. So they’re an imperfect guide to the subject of scribes’ identities and their labor output to begin with.

But as the authors of this paper themselves acknowledge—and they are scrupulous about outlining many of the weaknesses of this dataset—the six volumes of colophons compiled by the Benedictines of Bouveret are even less reliable than the colophons they record (and there are, further, unknown historical variables that resulted in a disproportionately higher survival rate of manuscripts produced by men). Reviews of the volumes consistently refer to their inaccuracies, their gaps, and in the words of one scholar who reviewed the final volume and summarized how the entire set should be approached, “caveat lector.”

So this is the dataset from which the authors proceed, and after counting up all the 254 colophons that identify a female scribe (1.1% of the 23,774 colophons in the catalogue), they extrapolate this percentage to some other extrapolation of all the manuscripts that might have been produced between 800 and 1600, based on an estmation of loss rates (a notoriously uncertain conjecture, and, again, the authors note this). They calculate 110,000, of “which at least 8000 should still exist.” 

The authors refer to their work as a “first step,” but the questions to which they point don’t ensue from their conclusions. They suggest that scholars might attempt to identify as-yet unknown communities of female scribes from historical records or they might consider”socio-political and socio-economic links to literacy, throwing light on when, why and how women worked as scribes during specific time periods.” These are questions that historians have already, for a long while, been asking. The “big picture” provided by the present study, built on a foundation of extremely partial and often incorrect data, is not actually a first step towards any of this.

I admit I’m not sure what the aim of this paper was given that the guiding question is not answerable based on the data or methods used to approach it. The project was supported by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation, which awards grants “to support research at the interface between basic research and clinical research at the University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital.” This is all very much above board: a foundation has money to offer research that involves scholars in clinical research, and that’s exactly what the authors of this paper did. I wonder, though, whether the existence of the grant was the impetus here. And if that’s the case, then molding a project to satisfy its conditions engendered the results the usefulness of which the authors do not articulate. 

But now we have a piece circulating the number that 1.1% of manuscripts were produced by female scribes, which might have once amounted to 110,000 books, 8,000 of which might still be around.

That’s Numberwang!

From Jewish Badges in 1218 to Technofascism in 2025

A short book I’m writing with the somewhat forbidding title, Book History Is Not the History of the Book: Four Essays from Fifteenth-Century England, is founded on the simple premise that the traditional, linear formulas that have structured the field of book history (from orality to literacy, from roll to codex, from manuscript to print, and from print to digital) represent a technologically deterministic and teleological view that belies the complexities of the history of the book.

The introduction to this book takes as its starting point the moment when the idea that “the book” has a history came to be codified, politicized, and racialized in thirteenth-century England. It is, as I argue, no coincidence that in this moment, Europe’s first mandates to visibly tag a minority population was first enacted by law and that the form of that badge was what was seen as an obsolete technology—namely, the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Publication pipelines are long (and I’m trying to finish another book first!), and scholarship demands patience that is often ill-suited to the urgencies of the moment. So I post here the introduction and the conclusion to the essay that opens my book.

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK HISTORY IS NOT THE HISTORY OF BOOKS

In May of 2024, Apple aired a commercial that aspired to showcase the revolutionary power of their latest gadget by crushing within the gargantuan plates of an industrial press the implements and artifacts of creative culture: a trumpet, an arcade game, cans of paint, a piano with sheet music, a metronome, a sculpted bust in clay, cameras, a television, a guitar, notebooks, and bizarrely a toy emoji. And when that press releases its clench, all that remains on its bed is an antiseptic tablet, vapid in its gleaming sterility. It is a violent declaration of techno-utopian independence, convinced of the creativity of its own destruction. It is no wonder the ad was unanimously reviled and retracted; no wonder, because it lays bare in celebratory tones the technochauvinist vision that is a hallmark of our age. This is the legacy of uncritical arguments about the liberating novelty of the press to supersede the bounding conditions of history, the springboard required to launch humanity out of the Middle Ages into modernity.

While arguments against the role assigned to the printing press in birthing western liberal democracy have been voiced for a long time now, these criticisms tend not to take into account the broader historiographical model on which this idea is premised: specifically, a Christological paradigm of book history. This is a supersessionist one with Pauline origins that periodizes the history of the book into four phases: from orality to literacy; from scroll to codex; from manuscript to print; from print to digital. In what follows, I want to hone in on one important moment in this history when arguments about the obsolescence of certain textual technologies were yoked to Jews, forever racializing the history of the book. In her 2019 monograph, Race after Technology Ruha Benjamin implored us to scrutinize the kinds of assumptions that underwrote Apple's ad, asking "what is hidden by an idealistic vision of technology. How is technology already raced?” For Benjamin that means interrogating the racist assumptions written into modern computer technology. But long before those assumptions were inextricably woven into code, it was the codex itself that encoded hegemonic ideals. The case that I'll be making is that a landmark instance of the racing of the book as technology occurred in England between 1218 and 1290 and that the impact of this racing continues to be felt today.

[…. my essay then recounts the history of the Jewish badges, why the shape of the Ten Commandments was chosen, and the ideological legacies of this history]

CONCLUSION

Supersession, replacement, a progressive movement away from the material: these ideas are so entrenched in conventional book history, are so naturalized that it has been impossible both to see its Christological origins and orientation and to comprehend the narratives that it continues to underwrite. I have often told people that I am a medievalist for the same reason that I read dystopian novels: nothing makes me think better than to see my own world reflected back at me with enough difference to make me question that which I take for granted. In Gary Shteyngart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story our protagonists inhabit a near future in which America, on the brink of economic collapse, has only three main industries: media, credit, and retail. The social media website that dominates public discourse has promoted the idea that paper books are, in a word, gross. In one text message to her friend, our narrator Eunice Park describes her budding love interest, the nebbish Lenny Abramov,

Anyway, what kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. (No, it didn't SMELL. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) And I don't mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics with that Chatterhouse of Parma I mean seriously READING. He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly and just like whispering little things to himself, like trying to understand every little part of it.... I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming Chronicles of Narnia in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolstoy was a thousand pages long BOOK, not a stream, and Lenny was on page 930, almost finished.

 Later in the same message to her friend Eunice describes going to Tompkins Square Park where she sees

all these Low Net Worth Individuals there and they're camped out with all their dirty things... and they have all these really old computers they try to boot up but really they have no Images or streams. So after Sally left I ran home and got all my old äppäräti and I gave them out... They were so happy to have my old ghetto stuff that it made me sad because this is what their lives have become and just last year some of them worked in Credit or were engineers.

I was reminded of this novel when I was re-reading Sara Lipton's Images of Intolerance. Speaking more generally of the trope of the Old Law's obsolescence, Lipton points to an aesthetic attached to this idea, writing "In text after text, the Law's obsolescence is attributed not to its honorable expiration or to an orderly passing of the baton but to its own inherent aridity, deformity, and ugliness." There is a violence to casting the obsolete off the page, not unlike the brute force committed by the industrial press crushing the notebooks of the past, all to make way for the shiny, the new, ever striving to reach the immaterial. Long ago Kathleen Biddick argued that "the purported 'secularization' of modernity... has never overtaken this core Christian conception of supersession." What I hope to have shown in capsule form that is state-imposed signs of Jewish identity, mapped on to books and bodies reveal technology's place in this history. If the funding of far right wing figures like J.D. Vance by tech billionaires like Peter Thiel seems perplexing, it is because we have completely forgotten the supersessionism that makes such an unholy alliance ideologically coherent: it is not surprising that when Vance followed Thiel's advice and converted to Catholicism he chose the committed supersessionist Augustine as his patron saint; Thiel's less-subtle approach was to tout Rene Girard's Catholic anthropology and the socially redemptive role of the scapegoat.

The Colophon in the Rüdesheimer Codex of Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias

In the December 2023 issue of Modern Language Quarterly, I published an article that is the first to examine the circumstances surrounding and production of a renowned manuscript facsimile of the Rupertsberg Scivias, the most celebrated copy of the visionary text by Hildegard von Bingen. That manuscript facsimile was copied by three nuns of Eibingen Abbey and illuminated by the artist Josepha Knips between 1927 and 1933. You can access a copy of the article here. Sonja Drimmer, “Hildegard’s Scivias in Weimar Germany: Media Theory by Hand,” Old ‘New Media’ and Literary Studies before 1960, ed. András Kiséry and David Nee, special issue Modern Language Quarterly 84.4 (2023): 443–464.“

My main concern in that article was to take seriously the the 20th-century scribes’ and artist’s labor as articulating a theory about reproduction and mediation by comparing it to an influential debate about the role of replicas and facsimiles in public education (known as the “Hamburg Facsimile Debate”), which took place precisely as these women were producing their facsimile. Despite a paucity of textual material outlining the manuscript producers’ ideas about these subjects, the facsimile itself, I argue, reveals not simply their methods but also the theory guiding these methods—that is, a methodology.

However, there is one extensive textual document that does tell us something alongside the traces of the scribes’ and artist’s work. That document is the colophon inscribed on a final leaf in the facsimile. I discuss this colophon in my article and include a picture of it, but due to the word limit, I was unable to publish my full translation. To my knowledge this colophon has only been reproduced in subsequent facsimiles of the Rüdesheimer facsimile, but nowhere else.

My translation follows immediately below, and I include my transcription of the original Latin below that. If you would like to use it for your work or teaching, cite it as follows: “The Colophon in the Rüdesmeimer Codex of Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias,” translation by Sonja Drimmer. https://sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2024/1/19/the-colophon-in-the-rdesmeimer-codex-of-hildegard-von-bingens-scivias. January 19, 2024.

My thanks to Joy Elisabeth Reeber for reading and offering corrections to my translation.

Colophon. Rüdesheimer Codex. Rüdesheim am Rhein, Abtei St.Hildegard, Hs.1.

TRANSLATION.

This codex contains the most accurate, most true likeness, in both word and picture, of that glorious book, Scivias, which the very Abbess of Rupertsberg at Bingen St Hildegard herself composed and wrote.

This most precious original work held in the sacred building of St-Rupert at Bingen, which was devastasted and destroyed by Swedes in 1632 AD, was deposited in Eibingen monastery. Then after the first building of St-Hildegard of Eibingen was desecrated by secular use in 1804, it was joined to the public library “Aquas Mattiaca” [the Wiesbaden Kurhaus, which bears those words on its entablature over the entrance] where it is kept to this day.

The reverend mistress Regintrudis Sauter, who occupies the thirty-second position as abbess of the monastery at Eibingen after St. Hildegard wanted this excellent work of her own holy fore-mother restored in the first and truest form of the pictures/tablets and letters according to the  exemplum by her very own skilled daughters.

His Majesty Ferdinand, Emperor of Bulgaria, most August Lord, gave the parchment and pigments necessary for accomplishing/completing this work as a gift of the greatest princely munificence and nobility, out of the closeness of his connection to the Reverend Lady Maria Benedicta, a sister of this convent, who was born a duchess of Württemberg and was [then] called/dedicated [to the same].

The ingeniously designed and ornamented binding of this book was made with elegance by hand by craftsmen at the Abbey of Maria Laach, completed by means of the singular, true method in the office of the Herder Verlag in Freibourg.

This most serious work (i.e. copy?) of the original as though [it had been] created and fashioned anew finished within the span of a year and six months to the 25th anniversary of Reverend Mistress Regintrudis Sauter’s Abbacy on the 8th day of September in 1933, the jubilee year of our redemption, celebrated with the highest joy and with most intimate devotion.

This divine work is a gift of God, thanks be to God.

Colophon. Rüdesheimer Codex. Rüdesheim am Rhein, Abtei St.Hildegard, Hs.1.

original text.

Hic codex continet accuratissimam et in verborum contextu et in miniaturis picturisque verissimam imaginem incluti illius libri, quem ipsa Abbatissa monasterii in monte Sancti Ruperti ad Bingum quondam siti Sancta Hildegardis scripsit et inscripsit Scivias.

Pretiosissimum huius operis archetypum sacris aedibus S. Ruperti ad Bingium anno Domini 1632 a Suecis pervastatis atque destructis in monasterium Eibingense delatum est. Unde postquam prius aedificium Sanctae Hildegardis Eibingense ad usum saecularem anno Domini 1804 profanatum est, bibliothecae ad Aquas Mattiacas publice institutae adjiunctum est, ubi adhuc asservatur.

Domna Reverenda Regintrudis Sauter, prima redintegrati monasterii Eibingensis Abbatissa, quae trigesimum secundum post sanctum Hildegardem huius coenobii obtinet locum abbatialem, hoc eximium Sanctae Proavia suae opus in prima verissimaque tabularum litterarumque forma ad exemplum reddi voluit per suas ipsius filias artifices.

Membrana et colores ad opus perficiendum necessarios dono dedit summa cum principis munificentia ac liberalitate Sua Maiestas Ferdinandus, Bulgagorum Imperator, Augustissimus Dominus propinquitate coniunctus cum Reverenda Domna Maria Benedicta, huius monasterii moniale, quae ducessa de Württemberg nata est et nuncupata.

 Huius libri tegumentum ingeniose compositum atque ornamentum elegantiaque manu fictum est ab artificibus Abbatiae B.M.V. ad Lacum, singulari vero arte confectum est in officinis Editionis Herderianae Friburgensis.

Gravissimum hoc opus archetypi quasi denuo creandi atque formandi moniales Eibingensis intra sex mensium et anni spatium ad vigesimumquintum anniversarium Reverendae Dominae Reginstrudis Sauter Abbatissae die 8 Septembris anni iubilaei redemptionis nostrae MCMXXXIII celebratum summo cum gaudio intimaquae devotione perfecerunt.

 Est Donum Dei hoc opus divinum Deo gratias.