THE LETTER OF EADWINE is included in two manuscripts that bridge political and cultural upheaval (periodized as preand post-Conquest) and regions of medieval England (the north and south). A short and entertaining text narrating the adventures of a Winchester monk, Eadwine, the letter or writ reveals a great deal about how the major religious houses in Winchester and Durham wished to promote their institutions and saints long into the twelfth century. More, this short text is neither history, nor memoir; neither fiction nor epistle; neither romance nor hagiography. It problematizes issues of form, genre, and function, present and past, in a delightful story of care for the body of the long-dead Cuthbert, and the ongoing curation and preservation of relics from days gone by. Present-day scholarly obsessions with chronology and sociopolitics dissipate in a short but complex narrative that fruitfully defies categories.

This chapter considers the use of the past. How was it used in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. How is it used now? And how did manuscript compilers and textual producers in the distant past use their own pasts? From this long temporal distance, is it possible to learn more about how and for what purpose institutional author-scribes reinvented their own histories for their own communities? The twelfth-century English work that I call the Letter of Eadwine highlights the significance of these questions for post-Conquest English literary production and calls into question the usefulness of present-day disciplinary claims of what constitutes “fact”—the historical—versus the non-historical, the literary, the fictional.

Guilty in some respects of perpetuating the same dividing line between the literary and the historical, in 2005, Mary Swan, Orietta Da Rold and I began a British Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded digital project, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220, which ran until 2010, but is still widely accessible and frequently cited.