Inherited scholarly categories are problematic as my case studies have shown. So much that is interesting for literary, historical, sociocultural, and material research falls into the gaps created by delimited areas of study: periodization used to create comfortable chunks for study; linguistic terminology used to create a narrative of language development that is neither borne out by the surviving evidence nor indicates how language was understood by manuscript compilers and scribes; generic distinction—legal, homiletic—used to create consonance and contiguities that might not be the most significant aspects of the texts; and categories of script, scribal competence, and points of manuscript origin that foster a too-tidy narrative of production and reception. This tidy narrative will be challenged as more original sources are digitized and deeper questions asked about textual communities in the later eleventh to earlier thirteenth centuries (as here), as well as at other points in the long history of western manuscript traditions and especially as they relate to a more inclusive, global story of the human record.

What will replace tidy narratives? As new textual materials are digitized online, new tools made available for transcription, translation, and analysis at scale, there is a pressing need for trained interpreters (scholars!) of these works and their physical contexts. New questions will emerge from fresh research that seeks to think outside delineated limits—whether generic, classificatory, periodized—and these new questions in turn will enhance scholars’ knowledge of their primary sources and how they can be read. A world where manuscripts, documents, edited texts and translations are permitted to be evaluated on their own merits, or within systems of knowledge that are flexible and broad, is not out of reach or impossible. One final example can prove this point.