The Half-Blood Prints

Someone who is very knowledgeable, especially a college professor, is likely to be portrayed with a book about a favorite subject. Those who know a lot about several different topics is said to be "well-versed" (which I am assuming comes from a time before books, when bards would sing verses) or "well-read." Those who have an even more advanced knowledge that is mysterious or even mystical are also typically portrayed with a book, a book of spells.

If we see a depiction of Merlin, who lived before printed text existed, he would likely still have a book- and a rather large book at that. In addition to being highly expensive because of its size, such a book is worth even more because of the knowledge it contains. Clergymen, one of the most powerful class in the middle ages, always had another rather large book with them: the Bible, which although not a book of spells does have some similarities to one because of the super-human elements in both. Books have long been associated with both knowledge and power. But how does this concept change when books go from being hand-written to being printed?

To answer this question, I am going to do something incredibly post-medieval and post-Renaissance. I'm going to talk about our newest celebrity...

What, you didn't think I meant Harry Potter, did you? Snape definitely trumps Harry any day. And if you thought I meant Justin Bieber, you're out of your mind! (We're not going THAT post-medieval.) Anyway, as I am going to assume you all know (if you don't know, I will be stupefied), in Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, Harry winds up with an old copy of Advanced Potion Making for his NEWT potions class taught by Professor Horace Slughorn. Harry soon finds that this particular copy of his textbook is not entirely the same as those purchased at Flourish and Blotts. It has been written in by a mysterious persona who calls himself the Half-Blood Prince (SPOILERS: It's Snape. Oh, and Snape kills Dumbledore. Oh, and he loved Harry's mom his whole life. Yeah, now Snape killing Dumbledore doesn't seem like that big a spoiler, does it?)

So anyway, while Harry's classmates all get the standard run-of-the-paper-mill Advanced Potion Making, Harry gets Snape's old text with notes in the margins about potion making and other magic, including several spells that Snape himself invented. Harry's copy is significantly more valuable as it instructs him on how to obtain better results in his potion-making, making him perform even better than Hermione at the subject. Snape's old book also contains the incantations for several of the most powerful spells we ever see in the Harry Potter universe. Thus we have Harry's copy with Snape's notes, which could symbolize written text because of Snape's personal, hand-written notes, and the "normal" copy, which is significantly less useful and less powerful and could symbolize the print text.
Of course, this is not to say that the other books are useless. None of Hermione's textbooks have hand-written notes by professors in the margins, but she still makes great use out of them (certainly more than Harry and Ron put together). In fact, these books are so important that when the trio is packing for their extended camping trip in the next book, Hermione packs more books than anything else (and becomes quite upset when they fall over after being alphabetized.) In this sense, it is almost as if Rowling is trying to say that printed text is useful and powerful but that written text is even more so. In a muggle sense, it's kind of like the difference in the meaning of receiving an e-card with a famous painting on it and receiving a famous painting.

Rowling therefore establishes an idea of written text being superior to print text in The Half-Blood Prince, and she carries this idea over into The Deathly Hallows. When Dumbledore has died, he leaves Hermione (who he knows is going to be the one who is going to be doing the thinking) with his personal copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard (which in addition to the written tradition as discussed above in relation to Snape's Advanced Potion Making could also represent an oral tradition, but that's taking us down a whole nother alley). In this specific copy, Dumbledore has inked in an image above one of the stories: the sign of the Deathly Hallows. Hermione, who is extremely familiar with print texts, recognizes this addition immediately. Without it, the trio would not have been able to learn the secret of the Elder Wand, which allowed Harry to defeat Voldemort in their final (sadly anticlimactic) duel.
We therefore have the most celebrated writer of this millennium writing in what she knows will end up being a print medium (and what she knows will be the best selling book, possibly even best selling *thing* of the decade, the final installment of her entire series) about how the written medium is superior to the print! Talk about being stupefied! So if we, in our digital age, can look back at a pre-Renaissance medium/form of knowledge/style and see how it was, in many ways, superior to the form that followed, what must others in the fifteenth century (monarchies, the Catholic church, Protestant Reformers, guilds, universities, and even common people) have thought about this new medium that we today so frequently cite as the single invention that began the modern era? Just think about it. Use a pensieve, that may help.