1 Manuscript Culture and the Myth of Golden Beginnings Liv Ingeborg Lied, MF Norwegian School of Theology Published in: Lied, Liv Ingeborg. (2013). Manuscript Culture and the Myth of Golden Beginnings. In K. Lundby (Ed.) Religion across Media: From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity (pp. 54- 70). New York: Peter Lang. This paper examines the discursive functions of the routine references in religion and media studies texts to the introduction of print in Europe in the fifteenth century. In this academic literature references to the introduction and development of print are numerous, but typically brief and sweeping. They do not serve the purpose of providing nuanced descriptions of historical processes in the Middle Ages – the sketchy nature does not allow for that. Rather, the references seem to serve as a “given”: they are so often mentioned that they become commonplace. As part of the “Front matters” of books, they are so well-known that only a slight remark is needed – a single sentence in the introduction, or a footnote with a reference to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s seminal work (1979). 1 In the research literature of the field of religion and media studies, references to the introduction of print are commonly found in presentations of the origin of modern media. These often belong to discourses on how media and media institutions came to challenge the religious practices and institutions of the day (Hoover, 2006, p. 7). Importantly, the references to the introduction of the printing press often serve as the primary and “founding” example of how media and media technology once changed religion. This example of how media impacted religion is then used, explicitly or implicitly, in order to argue that media, media technology and media institutions can have the same effect again – a salient point in a time 1 Cf. e.g., Lövheim, 2007, p. 30; Hjarvard , 2008, p. 13; Lundby, 2009, p.10; Campbell, 2010, p. 5; Bailey and Redden , 2011, p. 7.