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.