“Go Little Book”

Abstract

Among the twelve modes he describes in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour identifies two—the “beings of technology” [TEC] and the “beings of fiction” [FIC]—that aptly depict the nonhuman agency inherent in the production and circulation of the premodern book. This essay offers a survey of the pan-European textual traditions on the matter of Troy as a case study in the history of the book, with the manuscript codex conceived as a crossing between [TEC] and [FIC]. I show that the affordances and ecologies of the codex as a “being of technology” lent it a vitality that allowed the fictional beings of Troy to proliferate in the Middle Ages. I conclude with an examination of the medieval topos of the “book of nature,” which offers a compelling example of the spirituality of technology.