THIS SHORT BOOK will address a set of current critical issues in the study of Early English humanities. It focuses on how scholars define written works as L/literature and history; how humanities departments and disciplines organize their Western medieval objects of study through categories of periodization and language; and how scholarly investigation of manuscripts and scripts privileges taxonomy and clarity, but at a cost to our understanding of these fields of exploration.

Labels like “literature” and “history,” inherited from the beginnings of modern university disciplines and fields of study, have long been superimposed onto what might be much more flexible modes of research and scholarship. Categorization, while essential (and especially so for metadata creation and discoverability), can hinder nuance, intellectual nimbleness, and new interpretative possibilities. It is helpful to acknowledge that more explicitly in research and teaching: how limited and limiting a particular perspective might be. The reading of texts and textual objects through genre or period as, say, “fictional” or “legal,” “Old English” or “Early Middle English,” “de luxe” or “ordinary” can mean having to navigate challenging foundational approaches and sources for the respective disciplines of English language, literature, linguistics, religious studies, art history, book historical/media studies, and history that confine and often frustrate scholarly investigation. This happens because inherited categories from genre to period to discipline neither work effectively to represent the textual objects that survive nor encourage more contemporary methodologies that could be beneficially applied to their study. Inter-, trans-, and cross-disciplinarity that emerged as modes of analysis more than a generation ago have had less impact on broadening and enriching fields of study than they might; training, for example, in medieval studies or digital humanities still results in scholars’ publishing, employment, appraisal, and promotion processes being filtered through the core disciplines, and all too often work produced in one discipline is not widely read or taken up in another, while work that is striving to be interdisciplinary and broad can be criticized for the privileging of breadth over depth.