Disrupting Categories, 1050–1250

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University, where she teaches medieval literature and manuscript studies, and directs Stanford Text Technologies. She has published over thirty books on medieval literature.

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction. Old English and its AfterwordChapter One. Fact and Fiction: History and ImaginationChapter Two. Known and Unknown: Authors and TranslatorsChapter Three. Life and Death: Transition and TransformationChapter Four. Manuscript and Script: Time and PlaceAfterwordsBibliography

Disrupting Categories makes a passionate and persuasive argument that our modern categories are ill-equipped to respond to the multiplicities and pluralities of the medieval world. Even if Treharne’s learned comments on specific manuscript features might be intimidating to nonspecialists, this discussion is aided by the clarity of her prose and the inclusion of twelve greyscale manuscript images, which usefully illustrate her claims. Treharne also provides editions and translations for each of the texts under consideration--some of which will be unfamiliar even to specialists--making this book easy to recommend for students and scholars within early English studies and beyond. Just as her final comments remind us of the necessity of open-minded and generous scholarship, Treharne graciously models for her readers different ways of approaching medieval texts through their materiality, making a cogent case for thinking beyond “the neat parceling up of time, literature, language, history, and script...that close[s] down more flexible or imaginative interpretative possibilities” (128).