Winged Words. Public Readings of Literary Works (i6th–2ist Centuries) is a timely publication. Hinting at the Latin proverb “verba volant, scripta manent” (Spoken words fly away, written words remain), it usefully reopens the question of the medium of literature in a period that is no longer afraid of looking back, while moving away from the exclusive focus on the shift from analog to digital.
The days when various stakeholders (publishers, readers, critics, librarians, and authors) were either fearing or welcoming the supersession of print culture by screen culture already look a long way off. The world of reading and writing has undeniably changed dramatically over the last decades, but the changes have proved less global and certainly less systematic than what had been prophesized (in a similar way, who still remembers the utopia—now seen as a nightmare—of the “paperless office”?). Our culture has become highly digital, but digitization has not...