Outside the Text: Materiality, Performance, and the Embodied Evidence of the Written Artifact

While still controversial among many historians, poststructural and deconstructive methods of analysis have facilitated salutary new readings of textual sources, readings that break through the positivist, teleological frameworks that had encased them. Medieval texts (in particular) were apt to be dismissed as valueless or treated as transparent because they did not match modern aesthetic standards or modern measurements of coherence and sophistication. But now, most American historians of the Middle Ages regularly practice such reading strategies, often without being conscious of it. However, this domestication of “Theory” is in itself problematic, not least because it prevents us from critically engaging the fact that poststructural notions of “the text” do not adequately account for the written word’s conveyance via an array of media, technologies, and epistemologies. Although anything can be read as “a text,” the oft-cited Derridean dictum Il n’y a pas hors-texte (widely misunderstood and often mistranslated) has nevertheless encouraged the idea that deconstructive readings only excavate silence, space, and conflict within texts. Yet the historical processes that created written artifacts are also consequential.  This paper will reckon with the conditions in which medieval texts were negotiated, inscribed, authorized, transmitted, and preserved. It will argue that reconstructing and interrogating the material, embodied, and performative practices of textuality is at least as important as scrutinizing the words that resulted from these practice. Doing so not only reveals traces of the many agents involved in creating written sources, it forces us to reconsider how we use textual artifacts as historical evidence.