BEFORE WRITING, THERE WERE long and widespread traditions of oral composition and aural reception … So begins the litany of textual transmission as a ‘one-way’ linear progression: from orality–aurality to manuscript, print and now digital. This ‘technologically determinist’ continuum dictates that each succeeding technology replaces its predecessor, but research is making it more and more clear that an earlier mode or modes of transmission may not be abandoned altogether but persist in parallel to their successor in a reduced or subordinate role. The dissemination of Christian literature in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides a prime example of the way that different materialities and modalities of transmission could coexist to overlap and interplay. But let us begin at the other extreme, with a phenomenon that apparently propelled print to a stratospheric level of superiority.

In July 1833 The American Tract Magazine carried a communication from the Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson in Myanmar lamenting the death of a Karen man and his wife ‘near the head of the Pa-tah river, who, though not baptized and never seen by any foreign missionary, both died in the faith’. The man's dying wish to his friends had been to have the printed Burmese tract entitled View of the Christian Religion ‘laid on his breast and buried with him’. Judson was so moved by this incident that he composed a poem: