In the slender Disrupting Categories, 1050-1250: Rethinking the Humanities Through Premodern Texts, Elaine Treharne has three interconnected aims: to interrogate the blurry boundaries between supposedly “historical” sources and “literary” ones; to examine how medieval texts and objects are defined by regimes of periodization, language, and disciplinarity; and to challenge the diagnostic and taxonomic hierarchies that proliferate studies of medieval manuscripts and scripts (ix). This book pursues this ambitious agenda through four case studies, each centered around texts thought to have been written between 1050 and 1250, although Treharne usefully problematizes the dating of these sources. In four engaging and erudite chapters, Treharne distills her knowledge of early English literature, histories of the book, manuscript history, (new) philology, paleography, and scribal practices to offer a warm invitation for medievalists to “move beyond the boundaries of received scholarly category and classifications...to effect exciting re-revaluations of what we think we know” (121).
The first chapter, “Fact and Fiction: History and the Imagination” asks pressing questions about history-writing in the Middle Ages and within the modern academy, through a close examination of the Letter of Eadwine. Treharne begins this chapter by reflecting upon her decision (along with her co-investigators, Mary Swan and Orietta Da Rold) to compile only literary manuscripts in the 2005 British Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded digital project The Production and Use of Manuscripts, 1060-1220. While stressing the practicality of this decision given the financial constraints on the project, Treharne acknowledges that the exclusion of cartularies and diplomata from this database perpetuates modern disciplinary taxonomies of “fact” and “fiction,” rather than premodern understandings of history-writing. The probably twelfth-century Letter of Eadwine, Treharne suggests, unsettles these categorical distinctions, both through its quasi-hagiographic narrative of a monk caring for the body of the long-dead St. Cuthbert, and its two manuscript witnesses: one compiled within a cartulary manuscript—Codex Wintoniensis, London, British Library, Add. MS 15350—and the other inserted in a non-cartulary but “monumental memorial manuscript”—the New Minster Liber Vitae, London, British Library, Stowe MS 944. In contrast to the “overwhelming judgement[s] of forgery, fakeness, fabrication, fiction, and inauthenticity” lodged at the Letter of Eadwine, Treharne argues that this genre-defying text reconceptualizes received history to rehabilitate English saints for the twelfth-century present (33). By uncovering its “layers of production and reception, of composition and retelling,” her persuasive analysis reveals how this short text destabilizes the supposed distinction between sources useful to the literary historian as opposed to the social historian, while also demonstrating the necessity of approaching texts within their manuscript contexts (21).
The second chapter, “Known and Unknown: Authors and Translators,” further questions the modern taxonomies by which medieval texts are evaluated and valued through the compilation London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv. Her discussion specifically focuses on the inclusion of an English translation of a Latin homily for the Virgin Mary. Much like the Letter of Eadwine, this homily and its compilation within Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv destabilize the delineations made by modern medievalists—in this case, the supposedly rigid distinction between “Old” and “Middle” English. Compiled sometime in the mid-twelfth century, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv includes texts which closely resemble their pre-Conquest exemplars alongside others which include linguistic features typically associated with “Middle English,” leading Treharne to conclude “‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English...co-exist harmoniously in this manuscript, indicating that the rigid chronology scholars assign nowadays to language evolution simply has no relevance to the manuscript compilers, scribes, and anticipated audiences within the twelfth-century moment of production” (39). From there, she offers a close reading of the English translation of the Marian homily, which abbreviates and expands its Latin source to tighten its focus on Mary as virgin and mother. Attending to the Ælfrician language of the text and the sole late loanword cæstel (castle), Treharne wonders “how this text could be considered early Middle English” by prior scholars—a fascinating question that perhaps warrants more answer than this chapter offers (46). Given this book aims to question and disrupt the categorical assumptions of modern medievalists, greater discussion of why some English texts are labelled “Old” or “Middle”—despite contradictory linguistic evidence—might have yielded further insight into the ideological contingencies of this delineation. That said, the subsequent analysis of this homily, which resituates its translation within the theological context of the twelfth century, usefully deconstructs the fetishized concept of “originality” within medieval studies and invites reconsidering oft-maligned English translations on their own terms. As Treharne concludes: “texts in the vernacular in the post-Conquest period were no less sophisticated, theologically informed, or learned...despite a tendency on the part of modern critics to undervalue this body of twelfth-century English material” (53).
The third chapter, “Life and Death: Transition and Transformation,” also centers upon an undervalued and obscure(d) text—The Grave, a short poem (c. 1180-1200) seemingly added as an afterthought to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343 (69). For Treharne, this literally marginal poem raises the question of what early English texts are considered literature and why. Thanks in part to its inclusion in the anthology Old and Middle English c.890-c.1450 (2009, Wiley-Blackwell) edited by Treharne, The Grave has received some re-evaluations of its artistic merit, but this chapter demonstrates how pernicious, nineteenth-century notions of “literature” continue to shape studies of this peculiar poem. Since The Grave was twice completed, first written c. 1180-1200, with the final lines added by a later scribe, the dynamic textual production of this short, marginal poem not only unsettles modern assumptions about what literature should look like, but its admittedly difficult dating also calls into question the boundaries of “Old” and “Middle” English, much like the Marian homily discussed in Chapter 2. Rather than suggest that The Grave is an uninteresting outlier or an inferior retread of old clichés, Treharne reads this poem not as anomalous with the contents of MS Bodley 343, but as an expression of the textual aesthetic of this multilingual, multifunctional manuscript (81). In a fascinating reading of The Grave as “a nexus in a catena of literary transmission,” this chapter also raises the intriguing possibility that a female scribe added the poem’s haunting final lines: for sone bið þine hæfet, faxes bireved / al bið ðes faxes, feirnes forsceden / næle hit nan mit fingres, feire stracien (for soon your head will lose its hair / all the hair’s fairness will be shed / no one with their fingers will gently stroke it)(83, trans. by Treharne).
Although the first, second, and third chapters could be read independently, the fourth chapter is more like a continuation of the third, retaining its focus on MS Bodley 343, in relation to the diagnostic and taxonomic regimes of manuscript studies. This chapter also advocates for a redating of the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, one of the most enigmatic and interesting scribes of late twelfth or early thirteenth-century England. The shaky penmanship in the final lines of The Grave is reminiscent of the work of the Tremulous Hand. Through a close-examination of the available manuscript evidence and the assumptions of prior scholarship, Treharne offers a compelling argument that this scribe and the Tremulous Hand were likely contemporaries—operating in the early thirteenth century—although she notes that the decorative scheme of MS Bodley 343 suggests an origin other than Worcester. This discussion serves to illustrate the central contention of this chapter: the field of medieval paleography relies upon classificatory schemes which elide the variety and flexibility of medieval scripts and misrepresent literary culture as originating from institutions rather than individuals. Treharne urges us—by which I mean medievalists who work with manuscripts—to “[recognize] medieval writing outside categories of script analyzed in standard paleography handbooks...to think in different ways about writing communities” (104-105). Towards the end of this chapter, Treharne moves swiftly between a few different manuscripts from Salisbury to reiterate her argument that the Salisbury Magna Carta was produced at Salisbury Cathedral and to demonstrate that “scribal output could vary significantly and depart from expectations one would have gained from reading scholars’ script taxonomies” (115).[1]
In a brief afterword, Treharne turns to one final material example: Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS N. 31, a mortuary roll from c. 1215-1225 that includes a variety of hands alongside one another, some of which would be labelled as “poor” and others which would be called “neat” according to the aesthetic judgements typical of conventional paleography. For Treharne, this textual object—and others like it—serves as a closing illustration not just of the critical need to account for the diversity of scripts in the twelfth and thirteenth century, but also for the field of medieval studies to reckon with its unquestioned categories.
The brevity of this afterword is illustrative of my only substantial (albeit minor) criticism of this thought-provoking book: Treharne usefully dissects and deconstructs the delimiting categories of medieval studies, but her arguments could perhaps be extended further. Her timely reconsiderations of inherently flattening categories of genre, chronology, periodization, and aesthetic value echo some of the productive challenges issued by scholars within premodern critical race studies and medieval Indigenous studies. [2] Although Treharne gestures toward some of these interventions (4-5), I wonder if more extensive engagement with this work would have sharpened her critique not just of the dominant paradigms of medieval studies, but also of the field’s status within the modern academy. The subtitle of this book—“rethinking the humanities through premodern texts”—seems to promise that the wonderfully unruly and undisciplined forms of medieval texts help us rethink the methods and practices of humanistic inquiry. While Treharne proposes that reconsidering the taxonomies of genre, language, periodization, and script used by medievalists provides ways of responding to the continuing “crisis in the humanities,” I wonder if she could have stated more explicitly what her sharp methodological and historiographical critiques offer not just to medieval studies but also to the humanities, the university, and the academy (x-xi). [3] That said, it would be unfair to expect this slim, tightly-focused monograph to correct the challenges facing humanists today. Its interventions within early English studies have wide-ranging implications, asking medievalists more broadly to rethink the categorical assumptions of our field[s].
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).
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Notes:
1. On the origins of the Salisbury Magna Carta, see: Elaine Treharne and Andrew Prescott, “The Origin of Context of the Salisbury Magna Carta,” (2015) at: https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu/news/origin-and-context-salisbury-magna-carta.
2. See, for example: Tarren Andrews [Bitterroot Salish], “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts: An Introduction,” English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 1-17; Mary Rambaran-Olm, “A Wrinkle in Medieval Time: Ironing Out Issues Regarding Race, Temporality, and the Early English,” New Literary History 52, no. 3 (2021): 385-406; Brenna Duperron [a medievalist with Métis ties] and Elizabeth Edwards, “Thinking Indigeneity: A Challenge to Medieval Studies,” Exemplaria 33, no. 1 (2021): 94-107; Adam Miyashiro [Kānaka Maoli], “Race, Medieval Studies, and Disciplinary Boundaries,”boundary 2 50, no. 3 (2023): 107-121.
3. As Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold note in their recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, the oft-lamented ‘crisis in the humanities is really “a crisis of civil society writ large,” (2025) at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-crisis-of-the-humanities-is-over-thats-not-a-good-thing.