J.D. Sargan, "Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: An Experiment in Bibliography" (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)

Summary

---

Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network – Library Science Channel
Episode: J.D. Sargan, "Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: An Experiment in Bibliography" (Arc Humanities Press, 2025)
Host: Jen Hoyer
Guest: James (J.D.) Sargan
Date: December 7, 2025

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores how “trans historical” and experimental approaches to medieval book history can help reimagine both trans histories and the methodologies of bibliography. Host Jen Hoyer speaks with James (J.D.) Sargan about their new book, Trans Histories of the Medieval Book: An Experiment in Bibliography, which proposes alternative ways to uncover expansive premodern gender nonconformity and reflects on the experimental, imaginative, and sometimes messy processes that underpin historical research.

---

1. Introducing James Sargan (02:25–04:19)

• Background & Path:
  • Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Georgia (Dorchester campus).
  • British, with a background in History and English (Queen Mary, University of London), Medieval Studies/English doctorate (Oxford), and postdocs at Toronto, Durham, and Limerick.
  • Diverse research interests spanning materiality, book mechanics, and haptic reading experience.
• Research Theme:
  • Uniting scientific and theoretical approaches to books—how their physical structures support embodied reading and knowledge.

Quote
"Those are all kind of tied together by an interest in haptics and sensations and the mechanics of the book, how those structures, from the very scientific way of looking at them all the way to the kind of theoretical way of looking at them, support reading. Support the book as a reading technology and the way that method and theory might help us articulate that kind of embodied experience and embodied, embodied knowledge."
—James Sargan, 03:42

---

2. The Book as Thought Experiment (04:19–09:38)

• Framing the Book as Experimental:
  • The book is not a "how-to guide" but a record of Sargan’s own methodological experimentation—embracing the idea that scholarship is always in progress.
  • Acknowledges advice from colleagues about being cautious in presenting the book as experimental, especially as a minoritized scholar.
  • Influenced by Michelle Caswell's Urgent Archives and its advocacy for using imagination as a scholarly tool, and for finding joy in unanswered questions.
  • Sargan sees the experiment as inviting collaboration and dialogue with both conservative and innovative voices in the field.

Quote
"Finding joy in the kind of messiness of the unanswered questions and the unthought through was part of what I wanted to bring with this book. Cause it really felt like a very quick process from contracting to writing to getting the book out. Some of those ideas felt like they maybe weren't quite finished, but they still needed to be written through."
—James Sargan, 06:01

---

3. Challenging Normative Structures in Manuscript Studies (09:38–17:26)

a. Historical Norms in Paleography and Diplomatics (10:10–14:33)

• Development of the Field:
  • Paleography and diplomatics (study of scripts & legal documents) formed within colonial and nation-building agendas, driven by measurement and classification.
  • Strong ties to 19th–20th c. natural science, sexology, and scientific racism—an emphasis on typologies, measurability, and supposed national “purity."
  • Influential figures like Johann Gattara sought to create “Linnaean typologies for handwriting,” paralleling classification in biology.

b. Enduring Effects and Methodological Shifts (14:33–17:26)

• Persistence of Normativity:
  • Modern manuscript studies inherit the focus on classification and discrete categories, even if explicit pathologizing is gone.
  • The established categories (“national scripts,” “secretary hand,” etc.) are insufficiently flexible; actual manuscript transmission was much more messy and trans-regional.
  • Recent moves toward “scribe-centered” rather than “script-centered” research still risk getting lost in competitive attribution games (“I know his G’s better than you know his G’s!”).

Quote
"I'm not saying that modern book historians are still consciously working with this kind of pathologizing, moralizing lens, but we've inherited a lot of the focus on measurability and categorization. And that itself is kind of built into some of the methodological cruxes that we've inherited as well."
—James Sargan, 14:33

---

4. Tactics and Agency: The Case of Eleanor Reichner (19:26–27:25)

a. Who Was Eleanor Reichner? (19:55–23:55)

• Context:
  • A trans person living in 1390s London, known from a single, detailed court record in the Plea and Memoranda Rolls.
  • Arrested for sex work, the document records an unusually detailed account of her life (friends, work, residences).

Caveat:

• Sargan uses “she” and “trans woman,” while acknowledging the limitations and, retrospectively, considering the broader use of “trans person” for Eleanor.

b. Documentation as Tactic & Co-optation (23:59–27:25)

• Hostile Record, Strategic Testimony:
  • The court document was designed to police and normalize, yet Eleanor utilizes her testimony to embed her story.
  • Drawing on the concept of “tactics” (Ingrid Nelson, after Michel de Certeau): using institutional structures for survival or narrative recovery.
  • The extensive testimony could be read as Eleanor using the record to assert a narrative, even if under duress.

Quote
"How can we think about this hostile document designed to deny Eleanor agency in ways that recoup that agency without ascribing it some kind of false sense of empowerment... So I think about tactics from that perspective."
—James Sargan, 24:30

---

5. Reimagining Manuscript Relationships: From Stemmatics to Rhizome and Constellation (28:11–41:08)

a. Problems with Traditional Stemmatic Diagrams (28:11–35:17)

• Stemmatics Defined:
  • Method of grouping manuscripts into family trees, seeking proximity to an “original” text.
  • Critiqued for enforcing binary, exclusionary categories (“best text” vs. “defective” branches), and failing to accommodate manuscripts with hybrid or recombined genealogies.

Quote
“Manuscript copying just isn't that clean... So you have one of those harmonized copies, then where does it sit on the tree? It kind of doesn't belong in any place, but it's not its own separate branch. It's a recombination.”
—James Sargan, 33:47

b. Alternative Models: Rhizome and Constellation (35:17–41:08)

• Rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari):

  • Sargan (building on Michael Sargent) proposes the rhizome as a metaphor for multidirectional, interconnected manuscript relationships—destabilizing origin and emphasizing ongoing flows.
  • Recognizes limitations: infinite connectivity can render relationships too diffuse for precise claims.

• Constellation (Anishinaabe and Asian American frameworks):

  • Drawing from Indigenous thought and contemporary scholarship (Fiji Shu), Sargan suggests “constellation” as a way to map provisional, meaningful manuscript networks—telling stories paused in time, linking otherwise marginalized materials.
  • Constellations serve as fugitive technologies, enabling communities and subverting normative controls.

Quote
“I was thinking about how that might be used to connect medieval technologies together... in meaningful ways that break out or allow them to be fugitive from normative structures in the past and in the present, so as a kind of storytelling or world building within those manuscript relationships.”
—James Sargan, 41:00

---

6. Manuscripts, Touch, and Trans Skin Technology (43:22–53:24)

a. The Haptics of Manuscript Reading (43:22–46:27)

• Embodied Experience:

  • Manuscripts are uniquely tactile; handling and touching them can be community-forming (see Katherine Rudy’s work on visible reader wear).
  • Wet touch (devotional, with bodily fluids) is distinguished from dry touch (vigorous, possibly emotional rubbing).

• Community and Identity Formation:

  • Shared ritual touch (e.g., hairy seal-skin bindings among Cistercians) can forge affective, spiritual, or social networks.

b. Parchment as "Trans Skin Technology" (47:37–53:24)

• Material Resonances:

  • Parchment’s status as animal skin becomes a site for exploring embodiment, pain, and transformation—important themes for trans histories.
  • Iconography such as Christ’s side wound (analyzed by Sarah Kay and others) is “all wound, all gender”—inviting non-binary identifications; isolated, cherished, and touched images connect users across time and identity.

• Constellation of Trans Care:

  • Imagining these icons, images, and books as constellations creates a network of trans possibility and historical continuity—subverting strict “cisheteronormative” policing of the medieval church.

Quote
“I kind of think of them as a technology that circumnavigates the policing of highly cishetronormative boundaries that the medieval church and its gendered spaces kind of usually engaged in and offered a different alternative to people.”
—James Sargan, 53:08

---

7. Looking Forward: Next Experiments & Field Directions (54:05–58:39)

a. Sargan’s Next Projects

• Queer Bibliography Conference at UGA (March).
• Collaborative writing on digitized trans sources with Bridget Weirty, examining normativity in both original manuscripts and present-day archival practices.
• Supervision of research on late 19th-century women binders of queer/trans texts, exploring their appropriation of medievalist techniques for new communities.

b. Hopes for the Field

• Eager to see others apply experimental, trans and queer frameworks to bibliography and library science.
• Highlights novel work by Kayden Henningson (early print bibliography and method critiques), Elizabeth Ott (Rose Library), Carlisle Yingst (trans authors and pseudonymity), and Bree Watson (library science).

Quote
“I think there's all sorts of really exciting things happening that I'm excited to see. And I don't know, I'm still in book brain. I don't know where my work will connect onto those things, but I know that it will.”
—James Sargan, 58:39

---

Notable Moments & Memorable Quotes

• On Experimenting with Methodology (05:05):
  “I wanted to be in conversation with [conservative mentors]... and didn't want to occupy the space of dictating ‘this is how you must do it,’ but wanted to... propose alternatives.”
• On Trans Historical Tactics (Eleanor Reichner) (24:30):
  “Tactics, or thinking tactically, is a term... about the way people navigate institutional structures or norms that don't serve them. How can you use that structure in order to work your way around it and survive it on the other side.”
• On Constellations as Fugitive Technologies (39:53):
  “Constellations as fugitive technologies, as ways around oppression, so as tactics to beat oppression and open up lines of flight or lines of conversation.”
• On the Power of Materiality for Trans Histories (53:08):
  “A technology that circumnavigates the policing of highly cishetronormative boundaries... and offered a different alternative to people.”

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:25 Introduction to Sargan's background
• 05:05 Framing the book as "experiment"
• 09:38 Foundational norms and assumptions in manuscript studies
• 19:55 Eleanor Reichner: trans historical case study
• 28:11 Manuscript stemmatics and traditional schema
• 35:17 Rhizome and constellation models for relationships
• 43:22 Manuscripts, community, and trans skin technology
• 54:05 Next projects, and hopes for future research

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a rich, reflective discussion on reimagining medieval book history through experimental, trans-inclusive, and imaginative methodologies. Sargan’s work models ways of thinking beyond inherited categories and demonstrates the power of materiality, community, and “tactics” in both the past and present, calling for a broader, more capacious scholarly practice. It’s especially recommended for those interested in gender history, bibliography, medieval studies, or the evolving politics of archival research.

Transcript

[Marshall's Commercial Narrator]

When it comes to gifting, everyone on your list deserves something special. Luckily, Marshall's buyers travel far and wide, hustling for great deals and amazing gifts so you don't have to. That means your mom gets that cashmere sweater, your best friend that Italian leather bag, your co workers unwrap their favorite beauty brands, and your nephews the coolest new toys.

[James Sargan]

Go ahead.

[Marshall's Commercial Narrator]

A price is this good, you can grab something for yourself too. Marshalls we get the deals, you gift the good stuff. Shop [e-mail] or find a store near you. Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers. Risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you.

[James Sargan]

This episode is brought to you by indeed. You're ready to move your business forward, but first you need to find the right team. Start your search with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It can help you reach qualified candidates fast, ensuring your listing is the first one they see. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs are 90% more likely to report a hire than non sponsored jobs.

[Jen Hoyer]

See the results for yourself.

[James Sargan]

Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply.

[New Books Network Host]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[James Sargan]

Welcome.

[Jen Hoyer]

To the Library Science Channel of New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with J.D. sargan, author of Trans Histories of the Medieval Book and An Experiment in bibliography, published in October 2025 by Arc Humanities Press. This book takes a methodological approach to how we can move beyond archival traces to uncover a more expansive history of premodern gender nonconformity. And today I'm really grateful to be speaking with James Sargan, author of Trans Histories of the Medieval Book, about how applying trans historical or trans approaches to the study of the pre modern book can offer alternatives both for trans histories and for historical methods. So James, welcome to New Books Network.

[James Sargan]

Thank you.

[Jen Hoyer]

And before we dive into talking about this new book, I would really love if you could just introduce yourself to listeners. Maybe you can share a bit about your background and what kind of path your education has taken and then the current work you're doing at University of Georgia.

[James Sargan]

Yeah, so I'm an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Dorchester, Georgia. So I feel like I'm a little bit of a spy on the Library Science Network.

You can probably hear I'm not from here. I'M from the uk. I did a BA in History and English at Queen Mary University of London, and then a master's in Medieval Studies and a doctorate in English at the University of Oxford. Then I did a whole bunch of postdoctoral fellowships, University of Toronto, Durham University, University of Limerick. And those were all on quite disparate things. So my PhD and my kind of new current book project are about how people interacted with their books in early Middle English. So from about the Battle of hastings to around 1350, my postdoctoral work used micro CT to look at binding structures and the materials inside the bindings of books and several collections. And then the book that we're talking about today is different again. So those are all kind of tied together by an interest in haptics and sensations and the mechanics of the book, how those structures, from the very scientific way of looking at them all the way to the kind of theoretical way of looking at them, support reading. Support the book as a reading technology and the way that method and theory might help us articulate that kind of embodied experience and embodied, embodied knowledge.

[Jen Hoyer]

Very cool. Thank you for sharing all of that. So then turning to this new book, Trans Histories of the Medieval Book states in the subtitle that it is an experiment in bibliography. And you expanded on that idea a little bit in your introduction. You elaborated that this book is a thought experiment and rather than providing a how to guide, you provide an account of your doing and your own experimentation. I loved this framing. I feel like we are not often so honest about how really everything we're doing as scholars is an experiment. So I would love if you could talk a bit more about this experimental perspective and why you picked that to be so upfront about that. And then the goals that you brought to writing this book.

[James Sargan]

Yeah, it's funny you should ask this question, because I had some really sound advice from a senior colleague when I was writing the book in which she really encouraged me to be thoughtful about how I deployed the idea of the experiment.

And her concern was that leaning too heavily into the experimental would suggest that I was sort of unsure about the direction the book was taking or wasn't staging sufficient enough acclaim to the area of the field, particularly as a minoritized scholar. She thought maybe that would be brushed off as not a kind of serious intervention. So I did really take that into account. And I was quite careful about how I deployed that term and how I framed it up in the introduction to try and sort of be honest about the approach without kind of backing off from the approach.

And I think Part of what inspired me with that I cite Michelle Caswell's Urgent Archives in the introduction to the piece. And she really talks about imagination as a tool for change. And not deferring the imperfect in the hope of finding some kind of better future solution. And so finding joy in the kind of messiness of the unanswered questions and the unthought through was part of what I wanted to bring with this book. Cause it really felt like a very quick process from.

Contracting to writing to getting the book out. Some of those ideas felt like they maybe weren't quite finished, but they still needed to be written through.

So I guess a few of the things I was sensitive to as well as I was writing the book and reasons the staging became important for me was that I've written elsewhere about how I came to trans studies as an area of study. And I was really inspired by people working in pre modern trans studies on the kind of historical and literary end of things.

And for a long time I had a hard time working out how my work as a book historian contributed to that or interacted with it, and how I kind of fit in that space. And so in some ways, I've been experimenting for a really long time with trying out things that might make my work fit in. And so this is kind of the culmination of a protracted series of thought experiments that were happening.

And then more recently, I've had some kind of wonderful opportunities to meet people through the queer bibliography symposiums. And I've got to meet a lot more people working on similar approaches in different spaces and working at the intersections of queer and trans studies and bibliography, either with a view to method or a view to subject. And so I'm also sensitive when I write about this material, that I'm not the only one doing it. And that there are other people, my own thinking owes a lot to that. But they're also fermenting and distilling ideas. And so this is like one option or one way of approaching, not the way of approaching. And I think then probably the last thing is I have a deep affection for the field of medieval book history and the people who occupy it, who have been wonderful mentors to me. And I'm also aware that in many ways it's quite a conservative field methodologically, that it can be resistant to methodological change. And often interventions are marked with a swing back to the status quo. And so I wanted to be in conversation with those people and didn't want to occupy the space of dictating this is how you must do it, but wanted to kind of show gratitude to them and propose alternatives.

Yeah. So I think Caswell really gave me permission to think about that in creative ways and think about it as an experiment that might draw people in rather than kind of a dictating that's going to push a lot of CIS people away.

[Jen Hoyer]

Absolutely. So let's talk about some of the suggestions, the ideas that you put out there. In chapter one, you explore some of the oppressive and normative structures that have really defined the field of manuscript studies. And then trans bibliography reveals normative models is the first statement in a set of guidelines you lay out for this work. Could you share some examples for listeners of the types of assumptions that have been really foundational to the field of manuscript studies?

[James Sargan]

Yes, I think to do so maybe needs a little bit of scene setting. So in the first chapter, I'm talking about how diplomatic and paleography enter university education as supports to textual study of legal documents and of literary texts, and how paleography in particular takes off in the late 19th century and the early 20th century among a kind of growing interest in the editing of medieval texts and. And that editing in support of a kind of colonial ideal of what English literature looks like and what spaces it should occupy. So in this chapter I'm interested in exploring how the field developed in relation to parallel developments in the natural sciences, and in particular in the relation to sexology and scientific racism. And I should say that though connection to sexology here is the kind of thing that I'm bringing. But I really owe Francoise Kamil a debt for kind of pointing me in that direction in a question session. So I rely on a lot of other folks for a lot of the other historiographical work.

Okay, so one thing we might think about then, when we look at how those historiographical commitments play out in method, especially if we're thinking about paleography as this kind of interest in measurement and classification as a tool for enforcing land rights, initially in the early days of diplomatics and the kind of associated powers that land ownership involved, and then for thinking about the history and culture of the nation state.

So for paleographers, that results in a consideration of scripts. So the various formal generic models for styles of handwriting as nationally or regionally distinct from one another and kind of measurably different.

And breaking down scripts into categories based on those differences.

That process begins in the mid 18th century in relation to Linnean typologies in the natural sciences. And Johann Gattara, who's this first real kind of academic who brings diplomatic into universities in the mid 18th century.

Explicitly says that's what he wants to do. He wants a Linnaean typology for handwriting.

So then we get this kind of.

Double barreled Latin names for scripts like Gothic Textualis Rotunda, Textualis Semiquadrata, really modeled on what Linnaeus is doing, breaking down hands. And it's quite a few steps to take us from Carl Linnaeus to the advent of sexology. But the same impulses are there for categorizing and measuring variation in this case in order to pathologize and eradicate it. So this is where we move towards conversations about eugenics and see those overlaps with scientific racism. And we see those conversations coming together in medieval history of the period as well that medieval history is interested in. The Normans came to England and disrupted this sort of pure white Anglo Saxon bloodline. And paleographers do it too. They look at how the scripts have changed with the Norman Conquest and think about this as a kind of degeneration in handwriting and in language.

Okay, so we can see that kind of parallel conversation happening in both fields, but we also see that the people who are having those conversations are actually overlapping. And so it's not just that the ideas are influencing one another, but they're also kind of co constitutive that handwriting evidence becomes evidence of like become a hereditary moral character and vice versa. So that's my big blur.

[Jen Hoyer]

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

[James Sargan]

I'm not saying that modern book historians are still consciously working with this kind of pathologizing, moralizing lens, but we've inherited a lot of the focus on measurability and categorization. And that itself is kind of built into some of the methodological cruxes that we've inherited as well. So there are kind of several major conversations in the field that relate to this. One of them is that idea of distinct national scripts. So looking at England, scholars like Sebastian Sobetsky, J.R. matteson and others are kind of showing that the passage of secretary hand, in particular the cursive that you find in English documents from the 14th century century from the continent to England is much less clearly mappable and unidirectional than previously thought than we've kind of inherited this idea of it being imported wholesale and then used neatly. And really it was a much more kind of messy trans European conversation.

So our categories of script are much messier, especially when you look outside of the most significant books and document collections than has previously been thought. Partly because we haven't known to look at them in that direction.

Then we've often those categories have led to manuscripts being kind of wholesale assigned to one particular script or one particular group, when really the manuscript does a more messy compendium as well. So we become a lot less. We need to become a lot less category led and become more led by the manuscripts that are in front of us than we have been.

Kind of same token, there's been an increasing move away of from script centered approaches towards scribe centered approaches and looking at a kind of scribal oeuvre. But that's been accompanied by an interest in scribal identification and kind of naming people. And that endeavor is what leads to. Sonia Drimmer calls it a scholarly impasse, where scholars are kind of shuffling attributions backwards and forwards according to criteria of measurability, in which particular kind of diagnosable features are contested backwards and forwards. Like I know his G's better than you know his G's, and so that's sort of the same thing being used in the opposite direction.

[Jen Hoyer]

Yeah, totally. Thank you for breaking all of that down. Yeah.

[New Books Network Host]

The holidays have a way of sneaking up on you. And I can tell you they snuck up on me. This year I have people coming and I need to buy those people gifts. Or as I say, I just didn't have everything I need. So what I did is I went to Wayfair. From bedding to linens to decor for every room in the house, Wayfair is your one stop shop. Last minute guest prep. Wayfair has you covered. You can refresh bedding and throw pillows and accent chairs for way less. That's what I did. Pretty much all the bedding in my house is threadbare, so I decided to replace it. I went to Wayfair and I ordered some new sheets and pillowcases and I got a comforter, which was really cool. I ordered it, the price was great, the shipping was free, it arrived and now I am ready for the hoards to descend upon me. And it's not just bedding, of course. You can get linens and towels and things for the kids room, kitchen essentials, things for your living room. And of course they have holiday gifts. So get your last minute hosting essentials gifts for all your loved ones and decor to celebrate the holidays. For way less had head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W a Y F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home, every.

[James Sargan]

Holiday shopper's got a list But Ross.

[Jen Hoyer]

Shoppers, you've got a mission.

[James Sargan]

Like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows and.

[Jen Hoyer]

PJs for the whole family.

[James Sargan]

Dog included. At Ross, Holiday magic isn't about spending more, it's about giving more for less. Ross, work your magic.

[Marshall's Commercial Narrator]

Toast the holidays in a new way and raise a glass of Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. Enjoy it over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata, your holiday cocktails just got sweeter. Tap or click the banner for more. Drink responsibly. Caribbean rum with real dairy cream. Natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume. 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Powaukee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved.

[Jen Hoyer]

And so then, moving to the second chapter of the book, you write about the life of Eleanor Reichner. I don't know if I'm pronouncing her last name properly, using her as an example of how medieval people develop tactics for reorienting manuscript normativity. So can you explain for listeners who Eleanor was and how her experiences her life and how that is documented co opts norms of documentation?

[James Sargan]

Yeah, Eleanor was a trans person who lived and worked in London in the 1390s. I'm going to use she, her pronouns for Eleanor because that's how she presents herself in the one record that we have of her life. But I want to caveat that by saying in my book I call her a trans woman. And I've decided since I've reflected on that.

But really her account.

Leaves that open. She's reported to have said that she had sex with both men and women, both as a man and as a woman. That's the language that's used in the account. So I think thinking about trans as an expansive analytical category is useful here, but I'm going to call her a trans person.

Anyway. Eleanor was in London in 1395 when she was propositioned by a man named John Britby and she agreed to compensation of some kind for some kind of sex work. And then they were discovered having sex behind a market stall in Sopers Lane. They were arrested and they were brought to the Mayoral Court for questioning. And the record of that questioning is what is the only life record that we have for her?

So the first question about that then really is why were they brought to the Mayoral Court in the first place? There isn't a trial. There's no plea or accusation or judgment listed in this record. And it comes in a set of documents called the Plea and Memoranda Rolls.

The Mayoral Court mainly is.

Responsible for matters pertaining to the City of London, especially regulating the guilds, any kind of legal proceedings between merchants. So it has quite a small jurisdiction in a lot of ways. And if they were on trial for sodomy or some other sexual or moral crime, they'd probably be sent to the Canon Courts. Whether that happened after this questioning, we don't know. There isn't any record that it did, and we haven't found Canon Court records that seem to pertain to the same case. So it's kind of just an extended inquiry into her life that then gets recorded as some sort of.

Precedents or point of interest that the court thinks might be useful down the line for people who need to look back into their court records. The Rolls themselves only record a kind of limited selection of the cases that the court hears, things they think are gonna be useful in the future.

So this is clearly a record of her testimony, but it's hard to know what exactly the court wanted to happen with it. But it's clearly a hostile document that's trying to cast her gender and sexuality or sexual activity as some sort of confession. That's the kind of language it uses as she then confessed to X thing. And so it's doing some policing of the boundaries of CIS heteronormativity, but maybe not in the same way that we see in kind of later moral court documents that end with a judgment.

Still, over the course of her questioning, we learn a lot about Eleanor. We learn who she works with, who her friends are who helped her to get her start in sex work, that she also worked as a seamstress and on occasion behind a bar she was in tapster for a bit, that she lived in Oxford for a time. So she really gives a lot of information about her life.

So the questioning becomes.

So the question becomes for me, then, how can we think about this hostile document designed to deny Eleanor agency in ways that recoup that agency without ascribing it some kind of false sense of empowerment, that she's like this woman going for it on her own. She's being forced to answer these questions, and we can't kind of ally to that in the way that we think about it. And so I think about tactics from that perspective.

Tactics, or thinking tactically, is a term that I get from Ingrid Nelson, but she's referencing Michelle Citeau and she's talking about the way people navigate institutional structures or norms that don't serve them. How can you use that structure in order to work your way around it and survive it on the other side. And that's kind of part of the wider consideration of this book as like. One thing I'm thinking about is what tactics are available to trans people, both in the medieval past and now.

But for Eleanor, I think we can think about this document as a way that she's employing tactics in her interaction with the court system and that the document then becomes part of those tactics, that it then becomes kind of the weapon with which she gets through this interrogation and into a kind of historicised mode. So the document is highly normative. I said it's a copy of the kind of court records in perpetuity. It comes in the form of a big role, which, if you're imagining medieval legal documents, is probably what springs to mind and probably was for all medieval people as well.

It looks a lot like everything else in the role. It's presented in the same way, with the same kind of formal considerations.

So we can think of it as highly normative in that aspect. I said Eleanor reveals a lot about her work herself in the record and. And is then redeployed by the court as a kind of confession of sexual and gender wrongdoing. But by the same token, I see no reason to believe that Eleanor didn't have a sense of what the aldermen, the mayor, the lawyers, the scribes of the court were doing and what would happen to the notes that they were taking. So there's a version of this story in which Eleanor's considered course of action at this interrogation was to answer all the questions with as little information as possible, like just clam up and say nothing, do what the court wants, but nothing beyond that. Instead, for whatever reason, she gave us this extensive testimony of her life. And so while I think it's a mistake to say that she was in charge of her presentation in the record, I think there's a case to be made that she took that opportunity to redeploy her story in the way she wanted it told and have that represented as a kind of very normativized establishment truth in this legal record that people were then going to go back and use in future court cases.

[Jen Hoyer]

Yeah. Thank you for the nuance you bring to that idea of agency. And I also really appreciate the language of tactics. I think that, yeah, the next chapters that we're going to keep talking about present us with a lot more tactics.

That we can use for looking at historic material and today. So this third chapter then dives into manuscript schematics, which you might want to give a Brief overview for folks who aren't familiar with that. But I'm really curious what some of the problems are that you have identified in traditional somatic techniques and then what alternative models you've developed for imagining different types of relationships between texts.

[James Sargan]

Yeah, schematics is not the easiest to explain on an introductory level, but historically, it's the process that editors use to group different manuscript witnesses into text families that are considered more or less reliable, usually according to their proximity to a hypothetical original text. So you're looking for. If you're looking for the kind of authorial version of the text, usually we don't have these in the Middle Ages, but you're looking for the text that is closest to that, and you're doing it by comparing the variants across all of the texts in the corpus and deciding which ones cluster together, which ones are more likely to be original and which ones are more likely to be scribal. Mistakes or changes that have happened. There have been a lot of critiques of Stemmatics right from its inception that people were writing against this as a process, and it's been altered across time. So people are less interested now in finding the kind of urtext or the authorial text. I'm more interested in what they call the best text. There's a lot more interest in editing individual witnesses or editing clusters that haven't been thought of before.

So I'm not the first person to critique Stemmatics by any stretch of the imagination.

And a lot of my critiques, I'm building on things that have said, been said before.

But I'm adding a trans lens into the equation, particularly as a way of thinking about how, as a model, schematics visually puts limitations on the way we might think about manuscripts and the questions that we might ask of them.

So even as we might know that there are flaws in the model, we'd still continue to use it as a kind of visual expression of manuscript relations. And in this chapter, I'm more interested in that use. Then there's a kind of resurgence in using it as a tool for editing. And I am not a textual editor. And the people who use it that way are often using it not as an immediate visualization, but as a tool for thinking about which variants are important and tracing that out.

Okay, so the kind of problems that happen with this, what you end up with when you make a schematic diagram is sort of an inverted family tree where your hypothetical original manuscript sits at the top and all the descendants.

Flare out through bifurcated forks. So that you have kind of a set of roots dangling down at the bottom.

There are a couple of things that are difficult about that. One of them is this idea of the familial tree as a useful model in the first place, in that manuscripts are copied by a human copyist, they actually don't map very well onto the idea of DNA splitting and recombination, which happens really quite predictably. Humans are much more prone to error than their cells are, and so we have a lot more error to deal with in the first place. The other thing is the language we use to think about these diagrams. And so when we're thinking about error, we're often thinking about things that are wrong or a term that is used often as defective. So Tom White has written about the defective copies of the Book of John Mandeville.

And how the manuscripts in the defective branch have a bunch of readings that are dissimilar from the preferred manuscripts for editing, but they're also different from each other. They're not just one collection of manuscripts that are all the same. And by terming them the defective branch, the editor in the 1920s sort of turned people off from working on their altogether. And that branch is now super underexplored. And people haven't really thought about how they relate to one another or relate to kind of copies across the aisle in other branches. And so we end up not being able to research those manuscripts in the way we should be because of the language. And the visualizations we're using are telling us not to.

The other thing is that manuscript copying just isn't that clean. And so we have Piers Plowman tradition, we have three texts that were revised probably by the author, called the A text, the B text, and the C text very originally. But some scribes get copies from multiple branches of that tree and try and kind of harmonize them and turn them into one text again, rather than three different versions. And so you have one of those harmonized copies, then where does it sit on the tree? It kind of doesn't belong in any place, but it's not its own separate branch. It's a recombination.

Similarly, Jean d', Angouleme, I talk about this manuscript in my book. He has a copy of the Canterbury Tales that was made from a copy which either he thought was in error in some way or just had gaps in it, but only later did he get another copy for his scribe to kind of fill in some of those gaps. So then you have a kind of time problem of when do you pin this manuscript, are we interested in the earliest version that he had? Or where does the other version sit on the tree? And so again, it kind of doesn't belong in any place. So it sort of forces us to make false distinctions between the books that we're studying in order to fit them into those familial groups.

Michael Sargent summarises it really nicely. He says kind of forces binary thinking where you either have to go for the simplest route possible and cut out anything complicated about the book, or you have a book that kind of doesn't fit anywhere and then you can't really use it to justify anything else that is happening. You have to think of it as a sort of unrelated, off to the side thing that's kind of unique on its own. So those are kind of all problems other people have set up. I talk about them in relation to.

Trans relationality. And would that provide a different option if we stop thinking about families as this kind of top down structure and start thinking about kinship models and intergenerational models?

So one thing that I pose as an alternative, which is also something that Sargent has thought about, is Deleuze and Guitaries rhizome. Sargent thinks about it really as a visual metaphor that it doesn't prioritize a single hypothetical original text. And it has lots of ways in. So you can think about manuscripts in kind of multi directional relationship to one another.

I love Sargent's article on this. He goes on to think about clouds and other possible ways of kind of modeling.

But in this chapter I unpack Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of the rhizome a little bit more and show that it might also be a kind of accurate reflection of the process of manuscript transmission.

Which is not surprising really because they are also describing the process of textual creation. The article on the rhizome or the chapter on the rhizome is reflecting on the process of making the entire Thousand Plateaus book.

So we kind of know that there might be something in there. But again, Deleuze and Grattario are very complicated to kind of unpack.

They describe a process of textual creation that's multidirectional, that has lots of points of influence, not just other copies of the same book, but also the scribes who are copying them or the kind of textual environment that they're sitting in that has inspired the creative addition that they've made or the political forces that mean now Henry III is king and I need to change the introduction to my whole poem.

So the rhizome allows for ontologically different things to set in relation to one another and for those relationships to be multidirectional, not just a kind of single flow away from an UR text.

They allow for it to be transtemporal. They say the rhizome is kind of perpetual and ever changing. And so when I look at it now, it's going to be different from when the scribe copied the manuscript 500 years ago. And they allow for multiple entry points and connections between groups. So you can think about it from the perspective of, this is the manuscript in my library. How does it connect to everything else rather than having to think, oh, this manuscript in my library is a really kind of insufficient copy, and so I can't really do anything with it.

The problem with the rhizome is that because it just infinitely connects to everything, it's really too big to understand or make big claims with. So that was sort of what I got stuck with at the end of that process was, okay, well, how do you use this in a useful way? And the thing that I came up with was actually a student recommendation. Fiji Xu's book Constellating Home uses the model of the constellation.

They derived that model from.

First nations indigenous thought Leanne Betasamosake. Simpson has one kind of write up of this that's accessible to academic readers. But this is an Anishinaabe way of knowing that spans generations.

But effectively, for me, it became a way to isolate aspects of rhizomic thinking, to think about those kind of flexible, reciprocal, multidirectional networks that can be paused temporarily to tell a certain story or kind of deliminate, delimited in certain ways. So Simpson talks about constellations as fugitive technologies, as ways around oppression, so as tactics to beat oppression.

And open up lines of flight or lines of conversation. She talks about that in relation to first nations artists and activists. Networks as a way of connecting across distance outside of colonial structures. But Shu takes this idea to think about Asian American literatures and ways of connecting stories and books across time and space to build out a kind of a home or a space for possibility for Asian Americans who otherwise feel disconnected from their Asian culture and disconnected from American culture. So it's like building out of space. So I was thinking about how that might be used to connect medieval technologies together to each other in networks of relationality, not based on like, exemplar and copy, but on other shared relationships, and to connect those manuscripts in meaningful ways that break out or allow them to be fugitive from normative structures in the past and in the present, so as a kind of storytelling or world building within those manuscript relationships.

[Jen Hoyer]

Thank you for breaking all of that down so clearly for us. I really appreciated the concepts of Rhizome and Constellation in the book, and so glad to also get to hear you talk about those ideas.

[James Sargan]

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart Move Being financially savvy Smart Move Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

[New Books Network Host]

Limu Emu and Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[James Sargan]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching you Us cut the camera.

[New Books Network Host]

They see us.

[Jen Hoyer]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty.

[James Sargan]

Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Fairy underwritten by.

[Jen Hoyer]

Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.

The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you can you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn [e-mail] M365 copilot so then in the fourth chapter, you explore how the materiality of manuscripts makes them a vehicle for transmitting touch, for creating and sustaining community. And I'm thinking back to when you introduce yourself and your experience and some of those connections through haptics. I really see that in this chapter. So can you talk more about what this means and about how pages of parchment become what you describe as trans skin technology offering a mechanism for the formation of trans communities of care?

[James Sargan]

Yes, Haptics and touch is like this chapter is so in so many ways where the project started for me. So it's kind of funny now that it's sort of at the end.

Manuscripts are vehicles for touch.

They get handled. And part of the handling is, I think, what we relate to when we feel something kind of affective in the course of visiting a manuscript library. I think it's why students connect so much with those kind of visits to the library that you do with them in class.

And a lot of people have worked on this. Katherine Rudy is one of the kind of key names in the field. She's worked a lot on how touch might be recorded in manuscripts. So she has one of her earlier articles on this she's using.

I think it's called a densitometer that measures reflection of light off pages. And she's looking for where the dirty bits are, like where are the bits that get handled most. And she finds in books of hours, it's down in the bottom corner, people are holding them with one thumb on each corner of the page. She also talks about categories of touch. So she talks about wet touch and dry touch. Wet touch is the kind of devotional touch that often uses bodily fluids. So people may be kissing the page, crying, sometimes kissing their fingers and then the page. So it's an intimate type of personal touch, but it's also a touch that is kind of replicated as part of routines of touching and reading. So you might think about. There are manuscripts with auscultatory plates at the bottom that the priest was supposed to kiss as part of the mass and kind of show other people that he was doing that.

Dry touch is the sort of vigorous rubbing. It might come with negative affect, like you can get angry kind of scraping. It might be a kind of more positive, enthusiastic.

But we might think of it more as a kind of one off moment of passion than something that you do every time you read the book because you're going to go through the page if you're doing it every time.

In either case, that kind of touching can be community forming. It's a way of saying these are my particular associations with the book, these are my morals, or this is my kind of religious practice and an invitation to share in that. Especially when we're thinking about that kind of wet touch that often happens in a devotional setting within a community.

So one thing I've thought about with this.

In an article that came out before the book, is there's a whole set of bindings made in the 12th century by the Cistercians that are made of seal skin. So they're hairy books, like fluffy books.

And I've thought about that as a spiritual tool for building community. So the manuscript I was looking at comes from Shrewsbury. It's now in Shrewsbury. It contains a whole load of ascetic saints, lives from early Christian martyrs, ascetic desert saints and the martyr Saint Euphrosine, who is one of the cluster of saints whose lives chart out that they were born Female, and then for a reason, joined a monastery and became a monk.

Saint Euphrosine is sort of.

The most well known of these martyrs, but they're this sort of trans group of saints.

So I've thought about this hairy book and this kind of collection of hairy books as a sort of a constellation, right? The Cistercians had them in all of their libraries. Everybody had the sort of shared experience of touching them. And this was kind of community forming in a way that that touch was this kind of shared touch across space and across time to tell them we're all one group and we all believe the same thing. And I talked about the ways this might particularly lend itself to Cistercian spirituality. But this manuscript with St. Euphrosynen, then I think is really interesting because it's incorporating that trans saint into this network of devotion and making them part of that community, right? They get to share in that community of touch. The material of the parchment page is kind of different again, but I think plays on the same resonances that the material of the page is animal skin. And so it gets used as an effective tool by copyists to kind of particular effect. So Sarah Kay talks about this in terms of bestiaries, which give a kind of allegorised reading of a catalog of animals.

Where holes and flaws in the parchment surface of the page are then used to enhance some of the readings of the text and the animal body and make the reader kind of think more about the skin and the moral that they're supposed to learn from this. She does another nice reading of the life of St. Bartholomew, who is martyred by flaying. And so holes and flaws in the parchment page are kind of enhancing that narrative.

Other people talk about texts about Christ in a similar way that the skin of the book and the skin of the text and the skin of the reader are all working together in traditions about Christ that set up the page as a kind of potential stand in for Christ's body. And so my contention is that because of the.

Particular considerations and a focus on embodiment that trans people experience, the parchment page might also be considered a kind of particular site for resonances for trans people and one that might provide opportunities for community building through the mechanic of constellation.

So in this chapter, I'm interested in how that works using images of Christ's side wound, which are these kind of vulvic images. And a lot of scholars have commented on the vulvic shape of the image that genders Christ's body in various kind of non cis Non binary ways. There's a really good example of this kind of thinking on the COVID of the a book, which is a 13th century French bibel morale that parallels the typology of an image of Adam with God drawing Eve out of his side with an image of Christ crucified where St. Peter is birthing the female figure of Ecclesia, the church, out of Christ's side wound. So Christ's side wound is really acting genitally in that kind of moment. But the images that circulate a lot from the 13th to the 15th century, starting in convents and abbeys and moving into private books of hours, are an isolated image of that side wound. So the image becomes, if you like, even more kind of all gender and nothing else, because it's removed from the bodily and kind of given its own existence. And people commission them. You get them, like separately from prayer books, so they're kind of a very personal, bespoke thing. And then they get sewn in or glued into books of hours. So we're sort of all wound, all gender. They get subject to both wet and dry, devotional touching, kissing, kind of care. We can see them as sort of an intimate, occasionally erotic in the sense of the kind of mystical, affective piety that's going on in this period.

But if we view those images, those kind of dispersed images, as a network that connects together as a kind of constellation, what we get is a network that connected users to one another, and particularly users that were interested in or moved by or wanted to care for the kind of transcendent gender possibilities that the wound offered people?

And then the question is, what if that network allowed lay users to access the kind of gender segregated, gender transcendent spaces in which the imagery was first used? And what if those spaces were also the kind of spaces that made room for monks like St. Euphrosine? And what if they can connect trans readers now to those networks as well? So I kind of think of them as a technology that circumnavigates the policing of highly cishetronormative boundaries that the medieval church and its gendered spaces kind of usually engaged in and offered a different alternative to people.

[Jen Hoyer]

Totally. Thank you. Well, I've taken a lot of your time, but before we wrap up, I want to. I guess my final question is really two questions, but circling back to the initial conversation we had about the framing of this book as an experiment, really, I'm curious, first of all, what experiments you're working on next, either connected to this or if you're like, like done with this for now and working on totally new projects that you'd like to share. I'd love to give you space to share those. But also in this book you've laid out a set of ideas and tactics that other folks can take up. So I'd love to know what experiments you'd be really excited to see other people work on now.

[James Sargan]

Such a good question. I am organizing the Queer Bibliography Conference this year, which is coming to UGA in March. And so that's taking up a substantial part of my brain space. But I am working on some writing with Bridget Weirty. Bridget is one of those people who asks really challenging questions like, but how do we do this when we're working with digitized materials? And she is currently working on a project and that gathers a lot of trans sources, pre modern trans sources, in one place. So it's taking things that are already digitized, but creating a repository in which you can find kind of them all together.

So we're writing this chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Late Medieval English Literature, which was edited by Holly Crocker. And one of the questions I really wanted to think more about in this book was, and questions that came up whilst I was writing was about normativity and how medieval manuscripts operate to.

Structure normative points of view. And I sort of have a throwaway where I say, of course they're mainly normative, they're mainly church products or institutional products.

But I wanted to interrogate that a bit more more with her. And so we've been thinking about and bouncing around ideas about how trans content in manuscripts has been normativized by treatments of it both in the past and since, and how it also tests and supersedes those norms. And we're using a lot of material that she's gathered for her project for that.

I also have some student RAs who are working really hard this semester. And we're looking at late 19th century women binders in the arts and crafts movement who are using this kind of medievalist technique to model their bindings.

And we're thinking about how they use that to integrate. They bind work by some of the queer and trans aesthetes.

Like Michael Field into this kind of pseudo canonical medieval church type binding space and what that kind of work is doing, the kind of things that are thrown together in that project.

So I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with. We've got a huge big list of bindings that now we have to go away and think about.

I guess, the other thing, maybe the other side of that question. What do I hope this book inspires? One of my readers for? The book mentioned the title, that it kind of alludes to bibliography writ large, which is intentional because I want to draw in what is happening in the field. But I think there's a load of exciting people working on printing material. Kayden Henningson is just finishing a PhD at the university of Illinois, Urbana Champagne, and working a lot on Method and W.W. greg and the kind of early print bibliographers and what those methods hold for trans bibliography or don't hold what the critiques are. He gave a great presentation with Elizabeth Ott at the Last Queer Bibliography Seminar. She's the director of the Rose Library at Emory. And so the work they're doing is really exciting.

Carlisle Yingst is a recent Harvard grad who works on trans authors and pseudonymity in the 19th and 20th century and what trans people are doing with their names when they publish, or what the names people publish with might offer for trans identities. Kind of both ways. Bree Watson is a recent UBC dissertation on the library science end of things. So I think there's all sorts of really exciting things happening that I'm excited to see. And I don't know, I'm still in book brain. I don't know where my work will connect onto those things, but I know that it will.

[Jen Hoyer]

Fantastic. Yeah. Oh, really, really great projects. Well, thank you again for sharing all of this. Once again today I've been speaking with James Sargan, author of Trans Histories of the Medieval An Experiment in bibliography, published in 2025 by Our Humanities Press. My name is Jen Goyer, and you're listening to New Books.

Sa.