A New Way of Looking at History

In her book, Hannah Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation.

By
Eve Glasberg
October 08, 2024

In Experimental Histories, Hannah Weaver, an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature, examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic phenomenon akin to forgery. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of medieval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in medieval 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 write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in 12th-century and 13th-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology, and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in medieval writing about the past. Weaver shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time.

She discusses her book with Columbia News, along with her Proust podcast and what she’s teaching and working on now

What was the impetus behind this book?

Interpolation is a practice that has a pretty terrible reputation, even though it can be described neutrally as the insertion of material into a pre-existing text. Since the Library of Alexandria (!), scholars have devoted themselves to sniffing out interpolations, and excising them by marking them as spurious or sending them to the footnotes. Yet despite this burden of opprobrium, I noticed that medieval manuscript-makers were interpolating all the time. Interpolation is everywhere in medieval textual culture. This contradiction made me curious: Why would people repeatedly turn to a supposedly malicious practice? Was there another way to understand what interpolation could do, other than harm the original text? My investigations led me to the conclusion that interpolation provided a canny strategy for thinking about how narrative might reflect different experiences and perceptions of time.

Experimental Histories by Columbia University Professor Hannah Weaver

Can you offer some examples from the book of historiographical interpolation?

The most famous example of medieval interpolation is in a 13th-century manuscript held in the Biblothèque nationale de France. The manuscript has a copy of a 12th-century history of Britain by a cleric called Wace. Wace was a scrupulous historian, who recorded any doubts he had during his research. When he got to King Arthur, he commented that he had heard tell of a bunch of adventures that had happened during Arthur’s reign, but that he couldn’t find any evidence, so he preferred not to recount them.

In most Wace manuscripts, the history continues apace after this brief authorial comment. Not so in BnF fr. 1450, where an interpolator has inserted five lengthy Arthurian romances about said adventures, going against the author’s explicit hesitations about their value. All of a sudden, in this rather sober history, we’ve got Lancelot rescuing Guinevere, a knight who has a lion for a companion, jousts, witches and potions, the whole nine yards. And yet, if you read the entire composite work, it creates new patterns of repetition across time that encourage readers to think about their experiences in terms of prefiguration and fulfillment—in other words, to think typologically.

Is this medieval method comparable to modern textual techniques of creating history?

This is an interesting question, because I think interpolation is alive and well as a way of thinking about time, but it’s now most visible in texts that we consider fictional rather than in the work of historians. Proust, for example, relies heavily on interpolation (both in terms of his writerly practice, and in terms of how he thinks time can be regained). But one thing that we do see in my book is the way that medieval historians, just like modern ones, were careful and critical compilers of sources who were not afraid to revise their understanding of the past based on new evidence. 

Are there any classic works of fiction or non-fiction that you only read recently?

Oh, always. Last year, I finally read Maryse Condé’s novel, Segu, a multigenerational saga about the West African diaspora that goes from what we now call Mali to Jamaica, Brazil, India, northern Africa, and back. And I’ve just read Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I co-created a podcast about the experience of reading Proust as an expert non-expert—that is to say, someone who has a doctorate in French literature, but doesn't study Proust at all. 

How have your reading tastes changed over time?

I would say they haven’t, really! I’ve always enjoyed tackling long, challenging books while also romping through page-turners and genre fiction. I’m open to nearly everything, except, alas, horror. I’m a scaredy-cat!

What are you teaching this semester?

As always, I’m teaching Literature Humanities. I’m also teaching a survey lecture on British Literature to 1500.

What are you working on now?

A project about lateness in medieval literature, and another about translation from European vernaculars to Latin.


Hannah Weaver will be discussing Experimental Histories in a panel discussion at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities on October 21.