This book proceeds from a simple yet radical premise: what happens when we bring manuscript studies into conversation with transgender studies? Or, as J. D. Sargan puts it, “what would manuscript studies look like if we attended to trans people and trans method? And, more broadly, what would bibliography look like if it attended to minoritized critique?” (7). Trans Histories of the Medieval Book builds on Sargan’s earlier concept of “trans codicology” [1]; here, he has broadened his focus from codicology (which refers, strictly speaking, to the study of the book as physical object) to encompass multiple aspects of the discipline of bibliography (in this context denoting the holistic study of books as cultural objects, including codicology, palaeography, and histories of book production and dissemination). Across the book’s four chapters, he outlines a number of ways in which trans bibliographic practices can enrich our understanding of manuscript culture: these encompass both tentative speculation regarding the affective reception of manuscripts by medieval trans readers, as well as methodological insights regarding the histories of manuscript transmission.
Trans Histories of the Medieval Book opens with an introduction placing the book into the context of earlier work in bibliography and trans studies. Here, Sargan notes the intellectual conservatism of bibliography as a field. Drawing on feminist and queer critiques, he notes the “scientizing” impulse of much of the field—that is, that its practitioners make claims to empiricism and the identification of “facts” about textual transmission, scribal attribution, etc., but whose objective truth is not actually empirically verifiable with the evidence available to us. Nevertheless, he contends, this impulse drives the field’s resistance to methodological innovation and structural critique. He then moves towards an overview of premodern trans studies, a field which is only just beginning to emerge into intellectual maturity. He notes that although studies of textual and iconographic representations of transness are numerous, the history of records of trans life and literature as material objects remains under-researched and under-theorised. The aim of this book is to address both of these lacunae: to examine how trans methods can help us reconceptualise book history, and to explore what trans studies can gain from paying closer attention to the materiality of the page.
Chapter one builds on the introduction by examining the political history of the field of bibliography and its relationship to the exercise of power. It demonstrates how the constituent disciplines that make up the field were shaped by interconnecting ideologies of sex, race, nationalism, and empire. Sargan draws a particularly odious illustration of these intersections from the writings of the nineteenth-century British historian Edward Freeman, who boldly declared that the Normans introduced into England hitherto unknown “vices of the East,” such that in the post-Conquest era, “England might see on her own soil the habits of the ancient Greek and the modern Turk” (30). Having outlined the fraught legacy of the field’s early history, Sargan moves to examine strategies for opening up bibliography. He begins with the project of focusing on the underacknowledged role of women such as Elizabeth Elstob, Belle da Costa Green, and Caroline Spurgeon as practitioners of bibliography in order to produce a “counter-canon” of the field. Finally, he establishes several key methodological principles for conducting trans bibliography. This approach centres affect, recognising the importance of emotional and sensory responses to books (both our own and, where this can be speculatively reconstructed, those of contemporaneous readers). It intuits, paying attention to silences and inferences, and is necessarily messy and speculative. Lastly, academic practitioners of trans bibliography should take seriously the work taking place outside of the professional borders of the field by amateurs, such as booksellers, public educators, and researchers without institutional affiliation.
Chapter two seeks to apply these methods using the case study of Eleanor Rykener, one of the canonical figures of medieval trans history. Rykener, a transgender sex worker, was arrested in 1395 and brought before the Mayoral Court of London for questioning, the record of which was copied into the court’s Plea and Memoranda Roll. Sargan observers that the roll was not a working document; rather, it was a “best copy” designed to be an item of historical record, a curated summary of the year’s business of the court and an expression of the civic government’s moral and cultural values. He argues therefore that Rykener’s testimony, as recorded on the roll, can be considered as a type of “performative repertoire.” That is, she deliberately sought to represent herself in the ongoing legal proceedings as performing a normative femininity through her history of undertaking feminine-coded labour besides sex work (such as her employment as a tapster and embroiderer) and her participation in female interpersonal networks. She aimed to make herself legible as a woman to the court, and to have that recognition made concrete through enrolment in the record, though Sargan concludes that this attempted strategy seems to have been unsuccessful. While much ink has been spilled over Rykener, rarely have scholars paid sufficiently close attention to the codicological and archival contexts of the sole source that we have for her life; Sargan’s analysis here brings something new to the table.
Chapter three focuses on stemmatics, the method of identifying relationships between multiple copies of a text and visualising these connections through a stemma, or genealogical tree. Sargan asserts that stemmatics as it has been conventionally practiced in codicology is methodologically flawed. Traditional stemmatics relies on a hierarchal model of manuscript transmission, which privileges those manuscripts that are the most “faithful” to the urtext as the most important subjects of study and deprioritises “defective” manuscripts whose texts vary from the original; these variations are characterised as scribal errors rather than conscious choices. As an alternative to this “arboretal” model, Sargan proposes thinking about the connections between manuscript copies in terms of the rhizome (drawing, of course, on the influential theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari). Rhizomic methodology is non-hierarchical: it explores how any given manuscript copy may bear the traces of multiple textual recensions, rather than a single “ancestor,” and it emphasises that “defective” copies are just as important for study as urtexts. We should not dismiss textual variations as unintended errors but rather consider seriously scribal agency in making these changes and how this may alter our understanding of the social and cultural contexts of a given work.
Finally, in chapter four, Sargan draws on the notion of “constellating” to explore potential trans affective responses to manuscripts. He begins with a trans reading of parchment as a technology of book production, noting the affective connections between trans embodiment and the scarred, altered, imperfect material of vellum. Then, he explores trans identification with manuscript illustrations of the wounds of Christ. Art historians have long considered the yonic potential of the iconography of the mandorla, but Sargan pushes this reading further: though depictions of the holy wounds often resemble vulvae, this does not necessarily “feminise” Christ. Instead, Sargan invites us to consider trans masculine affective responses to this iconography. Lastly, the chapter explores the trans haptics of parchment, the experience of physically touching and feeling the page. Sargan suggests that the act of touching yonic representations of Christ’s wounds—as evidenced by the specific wear and tear to these images in many manuscripts—built a form of trans-historical community of trans readers who adapted the symbolism of the wounds to personal needs even when such affective responses were not the normative ones. Here, Sargan puts his analysis in conversation with the work of Sophie Sexon [2] and Jonah Coman [3]; this chapter can also be usefully read alongside recent articles by Hannah Skoda [4] and Michael Eber [5] that offer trans readings of specific manuscripts and iconographic programmes. For me, this constitutes one of the most exciting and novel contributions of Trans Histories of the Medieval Book. It serves as a crucial reminder of a seemingly obvious but often forgotten point: that medieval readers encountered the sources of trans history not as disarticulated “texts” in modern critical editions but as material objects, and this (gendered) materiality mediated how they interacted with them.
This book is a welcome and powerful intervention in the field of premodern trans studies. Increasingly, scholars such as Ilya Maude and Maroula Perisanidi [6], Blake Gutt [7], and Leah DeVun [8] have called on the field to move past the focus on individual biography which has characterised much of its early work. Microhistorical research on figures such as Eleanor Rykener, Katherina Hetzeldorfer, Rolandina Ronchaia, and Margalida Borràs has made possible a historicist argument for the existence of trans people in premodernity. How these subjects themselves understood their sense of gender is another matter, but if we take transness to be an act rather than identity—something that a person does to consciously (re)shape their gender presentation and the ways in which they are gendered by the society around them—then there is no longer any need to be so coy about stating it: the documentary record proves, as much as it is possible to empirically prove anything on the basis of the archive alone, that there were subjects who lived and (at least temporarily) passed as a gender other than what they were assigned at birth, or in other words, there were people who transitioned. Premodern trans studies therefore needs to start thinking systematically about the broader historical forces which shaped the material conditions and representational codes of trans life. This requires that trans scholars enter into productive dialogue with fields of enquiry beyond the familiar waters of queer studies. Trans Histories of the Medieval Book offers a model for how such engagement can proceed. Sargan demonstrates how bringing trans studies into conversation with bibliography can be generative for both sides of the encounter.
If I have a criticism of the book, however, it is that at times the work deploys transness as an analytical lens in such a way as to unmoor it quite significantly from transness as a way of actually understanding or experiencing gender. To take the example of the discussion of stemmatics in chapter three: Sargan persuasively argues the premise that this practice was heavily influenced by both the methodologies and rhetoric of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial science and that this remains a fraught legacy of stemmatics that we as medievalists still need to reckon with. He is equally persuasive in arguing the case for the rhizomatic model as a more methodologically useful and accurate way to describe the relationships between manuscript copies. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced, however, that “transness” specifically is making much of a critical intervention in either premise beyond as a metaphor or analogy. As I understand it, Sargan is drawing a parallel between the critique of the stemmatic model of manuscript relationships based on a metaphor of patrilineal descent as overly hierarchal and therefore methodologically inaccurate—or as he terms it, the “cisheteropatriarchal logic of the stemma” (83)—and the radical feminist critique of the nuclear family as rooted in patriarchal authority; and that the rhizome signifies both a more usable model of transmission and a less hierarchical and more trans/queer-inclusive model of interpersonal relations. What then does this have to say about either the material conditions or the representational codes of transness in the Middle Ages? This is not without precedent; queer scholars have long deployed “queerness” as a free-floating signifier of anything which transgresses a norm or category, irrespective of its tangible relationship to formations of sexual desire or gender identity. Whether one regards this as either an intellectually generative expansion of the methods of queer scholarship or the dilution of a precise analytical language designed to articulate the historical and contemporary experiences of a minoritised—often silenced, often disempowered—community is perhaps more a matter of taste than substantive epistemological disagreement.
Sargan emphasises that his methodology is highly experimental (as per the book’s subtitle), and that readers may not be persuaded by all his conclusions. While I have my own reservations, I nevertheless think that Trans Histories of the Medieval Book is doing something very important: the field urgently needs vanguard scholarship like this to move us beyond the analytic hesitation of its early work. Medieval trans studies risks intellectual stagnation if it does not engage in dialogue with other fields of enquiry, even when—especially when—the fields in question have a history of resistance to, or hostility towards, minoritised critique. Sargan’s work proves the value of such conversations.
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Notes:
1. J. D. Sargan, “What Could a Trans Book History Look Like? Towards Trans Codicology,” Criticism 64, no. 3 (2022): 571-86.
2. Sophie Sexon, “Gender-Querying Christ’s Wounds: A Non-Binary Interpretation of Christ’s Body in Late Medieval Imagery,” Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.
3. Jonah Coman, “Queering Christ: Habitus Theology as Trans-Embodied Incarnation in Late Medieval Culture.” PhD Diss., Glasgow School of Art, 2019.
4. Hannah Skoda, “St Wilgefortis and her/their Beard: The Devotions of Unhappy Wives and Non-binary People,” History Workshop Journal 95 (2023): 51-74.
5. Michael Eber, “I, Monster: Queerness and the Liber Monstrorum in Early Medieval St Gall,” Early Medieval Europe 32 (2024): 543-64.
6. Ilya Maude and Maroula Perisanidi, “Transmisogyny, Ableism and Compulsory Cisness: Case Studies from Byzantium,” Past & Present 268, no. 1 (2025): 225-49.
7. Blake Gutt, “Medieval Transgender Studies: The Pasts and Futures of Trans Presents,” Speculum 101, no. 1 (2026): 321-27.
8. Leah DeVun, “Radical Reimagining and the Work of Queer and Trans History,” Speculum 101, no. 1 (2026): 21-26.