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Catrin Haberfield

@catrinh.bsky.social

2.4K followers 850 following 48 posts

Medievalist and B2B copywriter | PhD candidate @Stanford | Old English, manuscript studies, DH, and UX approaches to textual cultures of the Insular world (they/she)

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Reposted by Catrin Haberfield

Sonja Drimmer

@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social

Found it!

Screenshot of a slide showing the first paragraph of the intro to Jarvis's book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis. The main text itself reads:
"utenberg's era-print's era, the era of the book for the last 550 years—was a grand exception in the course of history. That is what Tom Pettitt, Lars Ole Sauerberg, and Marianne Borch, professors at
the University of Southern Denmark, assert in the theory they name the Gutenberg Parenthesis. It goes like this:
On the other side of the Parenthesis, before printing, stories and intormation wera passed along mouth-to-mouth by tamily, triend, traveler, town crier, and balladeer. News, rumor, verse, and song would evolve along the way. Knowledge and memory were collective, collaborative, and often performative using rhyme and lyric. There was little sense of authorship or ownership of information or tale. The business of books was expensive but simple: one manuscript, one scribe, one patron, and much time. The scribes' higher mission was to preserve the knowledge of the ancients."

My annotations are as follows:

Ballads’ heyday was after the introduction of print. See Fumerton, Broadside Ballad (2021)

Commercial manuscript production in Europe was capable of copying many books out at speed beginning in the 13th century. One technique that facilitated speed was the pecia system.

The Middle Ages had a robust theory of authorship, & while different from other eras’, it was very well developed and extensively discussed. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (1984)

Short stories that circulated in manuscript throughout the Middle Ages include “The Man Who Could Make Vaginas Talk” and another one about using the spokes of a wheel to divide up a fart evenly.

July 10, 2025 at 4:36 PM

Reposted by Catrin Haberfield

Matilda Fitzmaurice

@matildaf.bsky.social

I'm constantly thinking about the fact that despite all the focus on 'impact', they don't seem to count the context in which we have the most impact of all: teaching students, and especially those from a wide range of backgrounds

June 25, 2025 at 10:15 AM