Disrupting Categories, 1050–1250
Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Arc Humanities Press
Published:30th Sep '24
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This study uses a series of medieval texts to address a set of urgent critical issues in Humanities centring on categories of L/literature, history, periodization, languages, and descriptions of script. These categories are inherited from the foundation of modern disciplines and fields of study, superimposed on what could be more flexible modes of scholarship. They are reinforced by modern academics in ways that hinder nuance, intellectual nimbleness, and new interpretative possibilities. Readers and researchers of English Language, Literature, Book Historical/Media Studies, and History are obliged by delimiting labels to navigate problematic foundational approaches and sources that confine and frustrate scholarly investigation. Through a series of cogent case studies, all situated from 1050 to 1250, the book highlights how restrictive and hierarchical modern scholarly categories can sometimes be.
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).
-- Basil Arnould Price * The Medieval Review TMR (Jan 2026): 26.01.1ISBN: 9781802700862
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156 pages
New edition