Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past
by Hannah Weaver

In Experimental Histories, Hannah Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of medieval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in medieval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past.

For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analyzing the long history of interpolated historiography, including the Bayeux Embroidery, Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in medieval writing about the past. Drawing on both manuscript studies and the new formalism, it shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time.

About the Author

Hannah Weaver is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She teaches and writes about the literature of medieval Europe, particularly the regions now known as England and France. Her first monograph, Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell, 2024), argues that interpolation is the signature form of medieval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory. Her articles about everything from time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the treachery of incomprehensible English to the relationship of genre to purgatory have appeared or are forthcoming in ELH, New Literary History, New Medieval Literatures, JMEMS, and Viator, among other venues.

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