In one of the earlier narratives of Carolyn Dinshaw's story-filled How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, a monk in the fourteenth-century Middle English Northern Homily Cycle wins for himself a single moment of heavenly joy. When he emerges from this moment, three hundred years have passed, and the monk is permanently displaced from his home century (44–45). Dinshaw uses this story and other tales of temporal instability to stand for the experience of being an amateur or professional medievalist, attracted to the past, bound to the past, never quite able to touch it, and yet always within reach of it.
While How Soon Is Now? focuses on the inaccessibility of (and desire to access) the past, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, a new guide to Middle English codicology, uses manuscript images and manuscript studies as a way to...
