By Alicia Spencer-Hall

ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781942401957

For about 17 years, Twitter served as an important place for conversation and debate in the online world. This book examines how the medievalist community used the platform to exchange ideas, build connections, and engage in everything from friendly discussions to heated disputes.

Aside from its subject matter, this book consciously “embraces the social” in its manner of articulation. This is neither a traditional nor traditionally scholarly study of Twitter. Medieval Twitter is basically a thread of Twitter threads. I have consciously adopted an “online tone” and argumentative style as a praxis reflective of the source material—Medieval Twitter as a slice of #MedievalTwitter—and to pursue the broader aim of this book: to challenge traditional(ist) demarcations between the academic (appropriately intellectual, objective) and the non-academic (overly colloquial, subjective) in medieval studies particularly and in scholarship more generally. As such, this book assumes a level of fluency in online discourse and pop culture rather than privileging the typical proficiencies in medieval studies (and its various jargons) and the dry idiom of traditional(ist) academic writing. I provide a glossary for the basic functions and features of Twitter, for those who were not baptized in the hellsite’s fires. Similarly, I explain particularly “online” online slang and “deep-cut”—or especially obscure—memes. For the most part, however, the memes and online vernacular speak for themselves.

This book offers a history of how a single social media platform shaped the wider medieval studies community, examining the many ways that a diverse range of people used Twitter before its acquisition by Elon Musk and its rebranding as X in 2023. Although some notable Twitter accounts are absent from its pages, the book deliberately focuses on voices that existed outside, or were marginalized within, the mainstream academic community.

Those who were active on Twitter during its heyday will find this an engaging read. It also provides a valuable case study of how social media was used by those interested in history, particularly in its chapter examining the many depictions of Margery Kempe that appeared on the platform.

“Spencer-Hall’s story is framed as a tragedy. In her account, Twitter, now X, was killed off by Elon Musk, whose takeover changed irrevocably “the platform’s norms and culture”. “The world’s richest man had wanted something, so he had taken it, brutally.” What’s more, he paid no regard to “the collateral damage for users who had tended their social garden assiduously, even lovingly, for years” – users like Spencer-Hall. Medieval Twitter is sustained by such a plangent tone: the author clearly feels Twitter’s recent transformation as a personal betrayal.” ~ review by Anthony Bale in Times Literary Supplement

Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London, where she specializes in medieval literature, hagiography and modern culture. While Alicia’s X/Twitter account has effectively ceased, you can find her on BlueSky.

So I wrote a book about Twitter. Medieval Twitter to be exact—the interconnections between Twitter's textual modes & medieval literary culture(s), plus medievalists' use of Twitter and the #MedievalTwitter hashtag

www.arc-humanities.org/978194240195…

@archumanities.bsky.social #MedievalSky 🗃️

[image or embed]

— Alicia Spencer-Hall (@aspencerhall.bsky.social) 9:41 AM · Nov 18, 2024

You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website.

You can buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk