Yin Liu
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| A student examines the 15th-century Brendan Missal, University of Saskatchewan Special Collections, 2017. |
When COVID-19 restrictions made most of us in Canada stay at least 2 m away from each other, shut down international travel, and compelled many academics to work from domestic spaces frequently traversed by
cats and children, manuscript scholars faced, in a heightened form, a paradox that we have been grappling with ever since digital technologies gave us access to manuscript images online. On the one hand, someone like me, who lives in the middle of Canada surrounded by a vast expanse of farmland and a vast absence of medieval manuscripts, has had my teaching and research practice revolutionised by the wonderful array of manuscript images freely available on the Web, thanks to the generosity of many holding institutions and their funding sources. On the other hand, any manuscript scholar knows that staring at an image on a screen is not the same as holding a manuscript in one’s hands. Digital technology opens up some ways of approaching medieval documents, at the cost of shutting down others.
