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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Hannah Weaver, "Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Description: In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorised as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of mediaeval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in mediaeval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past.For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to wri...