Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past

Scholars have long recognized that medieval history writing needs to be understood in medieval terms. Medieval historians had a particular kind of training and a particular set of ideas about the purpose of their work. Studies have considered the implications of a Latinate rhetorical education in forming the writers of the twelfth-century renaissance. They have explored the limitations of modern ideas about fact and fiction when it comes to reading medieval histories. And they have shown the complex mingling of political and religious motivations in the works of many medieval historians. But Hannah Weaver's engaging new study suggests that one element central to the medieval understanding of the historian's craft continues to be either ignored or misunderstood, and that is the practice of interpolation. The addition of material is a standard practice in medieval history-writing, and it is particularly marked, she says, in histories of Britain, both Latin and vernacular. Yet interpolated material is often banished to the notes or appendices of critical editions, classed as somehow lesser than the text in which it is found. Weaver argues that, on the contrary, interpolated history manuscripts reveal “medieval explorations of the conceptual relationship between history and time” (p. 8). To pay attention to interpolation, then, is to engage with how medieval historians understood their craft, and how medieval people thought about time and their place in it.The introduction and first chapter sketch out the rise and implications of the practice of interpolation, starting in antiquity and moving briskly through Anglo-Latin historical writing up through the twelfth century. While interpolation is not listed in rhetorical manuals, Weaver argues that it is closely related to the central rhetorical practice of amplification. Rhetorical training, then, habituates readers to intervene in what they read, noting gaps and inserting material that might be supplemental or ornamental. The medieval Christian context, for its part, is the backdrop for an ethical approach to history, an understanding of history as the revelation of God's plan in time. As for time, it can be both linear and cyclical, recursive and expansive, and a careful reader learns to recognize in interpolations moments that call for interpretation. The rest of the book explores how the Brut tradition in particular reveals the various ways that interpolation appears in historical texts, manuscripts, and objects.In her second chapter, Weaver traces the particular challenge posed by prophecy, arguing it is “the mode of history writing in which competing models of time are most boldly conflated and negotiated” (p. 54). Prophecy, with its Biblical analogues, can be a site of heightened affiliation with truth, but it also has diabolical possibilities, and so a reader must decide in each instance how to interpret and situate it. This practice Weaver calls “prudent reading” (p. 56), and it can be seen in action as both makers and readers of vernacular Brut texts and manuscripts decide how to treat the Prophetiae Merlini. Wace, for example, excludes Merlin's prophecies, but some later revisers interpolate them, changing how the text appears on the page in the process. A close reading of three interpolated Wace manuscripts follows, with Weaver noting that the interpolated prophecies in these manuscripts attract more decoration and attention than other portions of the manuscript, suggesting, she argues, that readers are particularly drawn to flex their interpretive muscles in the prophetic sections of the Roman de Brut. This is a book focused on the vernacular, but the manuscripts of Latin British histories are similarly full of scribal and readerly attention that might provide a rich expansion of the arguments here–perhaps a thought for future work?The Brut is central to the third chapter, too, with Weaver drawing connections between typology and interpolation. Both modes, she argues, bring past events into conversation with one another and perhaps also with the reader's own present. While Wace's text is, she writes, essentially linear, interpolated manuscripts and adaptations of the Brut bring disparate historical moments together; she rather neatly calls the result a pleating of historical time. A nice reading of the two versions of Brutus who coexist in BNF français 17177, a manuscript that interpolates the Estoire de Brut into the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, follows, with Weaver suggesting that part of what is going on here is encouraging a reader to think about what kinds of typological interpretations are appropriate for secular history. Moving to Lawman, she argues that he embeds typology in his text through interpolation, thus shifting from Wace's linearity and crafting a narrative that presents history as a matter of prefiguration and fulfillment. I would have found a bit more discussion of the differences (and similarities) between adaptation and interpolation helpful here, as well as some further unpacking of the roles of authors and scribes, but the individual readings are very compelling. This chapter closes with two manuscripts that include Wace's Brut. In the first, BNF français 1450, the copyist interpolates Chrétien's romances in such a way as to present them as part of the history recounted in the Brut, while in the second, BNF français 1416, Wace's Edward the Elder is replaced with his descendant, Edward the Confessor, via the interpolation of the Vie d'Edouard le Confesseur, thus shifting the Roman-British relationship from the imperial conflict of the Brut tradition towards a religious association. A reader of either of these manuscripts is thus presented with a history that has been (re)shaped by interpolation.The final chapter of the study shifts to what Weaver calls “multimedia accounts” (p. 149) of British history as seen in two objects, the Bayeux embroidery and the abridged, illustrated version of Wace's Brut found in BL Egerton 3028. Interpolation as an idea is somewhat more elusive in this chapter, but the connection to the rest of the book is nevertheless tantalizing. The chapter seeks to unpack how images function in inviting audiences to frame themselves as witnesses to history. Mental work is required to bring the viewer's moment into contact with the past as shown in the image. That mental work involves a reader-viewer bringing elements from their own personal store of information to the task of interpretation so that at least some readers become critical “viewer-historians” (p. 153). In the Egerton Brut, Weaver argues that the adaptor created gaps by cutting the written narrative; the images are thus interpolations that fill those gaps, often, as she notes, in ways that seem to contradict the narrative. The resulting pauses and interpretive challenges open up the space for the reader-viewer to supplement and evaluate the history being recounted. In the case of the Bayeux embroidery, Weaver suggests that both the famous moments of confusion in the time sequence of the main frieze, and the interactions between the frieze and such elements as the fables in the margins, encourage a viewer to linger over particularly challenging moral moments. Whether thinking more narrowly about additions to historical texts, or more broadly, as in this final chapter, about ways of representing time, a reader will come away from Experimental Histories convinced that interpolation needs to be taken seriously.