Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet

Michelle R. Warren’s Holy Digital Grail centers on the long history of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 80, a fifteenth-century manuscript containing Henry Lovelich’s unique translation of a French Arthurian text into English poetry. What sets Holy Digital Grail apart from traditional manuscript studies is its approach to the text’s “long history.” In addition to recovering the medieval literary, social, and political contexts of the manuscript, Warren expands the story by following MS 80’s institutional history up to the present. MS 80 is now freely available online as part of the Parker Library on the Web (https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/), a pioneering digitization project led by Stanford University and the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. As such, it participates in our golden age of manuscript accessibility: never have so many old books been available to so many. But, as Warren demonstrates, there is more to the story of manuscript digitization...