Jerome McGann
Say �textual scholarship� and think �dryasdust,� and then perhaps see an obsessed St. Jerome alone in a cave or a monk�s study humped over a great tome with a pen in his hand, a skull and an hourglass somewhere nearby, and perhaps a lion and a dog sprawled at his feet. That complex figural expression was one of the central emblems of the Renaissance, when textuality�powered by the Gutenberg revolution�fairly came to define �the human condition� as a textual condition. But a certain kind of textual condition, a condition of �The Word� conceived as written or printed, a Word to . . .