Hannah M. Weaver

B.A., Boston University, 2009; M.A., University of Toronto, 2014; Ph.D (Romance Languages) Harvard, 2019. 

Hannah Weaver teaches and writes about the literature of medieval Europe, particularly the regions now known as England and France. Her first book, Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell, 2024), demonstrates that high medieval histories of Britain used interpolation (the insertion of foreign material into a pre-existing text) as an indispensable tool to think about philosophies of history and time. Drawing on material from specific surviving manuscripts, she shows that the characteristic modularity and often-discussed mixing of genres in medieval writing about the past served a theoretical purpose for readers and writers of medieval history: it allowed them to explore how different time-schemes interacted in lived human experience. 

She is currently developing two new projects. The first, with the working title Textile Texts,  is about the interdependence of texts and textiles in the Middle Ages. While the etymological link between text and textile is often noted and textile metaphors for writing are everywhere, this book argues that the connection between texts and textiles is more than metaphorical in medieval cultural productions. Instead, this book will establish that text and textile have a literal, material connection and reciprocity. Poems weave and embroider textiles and are woven into them; textiles rely on poems and tituli and have a vivid presence in texts. Drawing on a corpus of poetic ekphrases, Romanesque embroideries, depictions of tapestries in manuscripts, tapestry poems from late medieval England and France, and late medieval narrative tapestries, Textile Texts uncovers the intimacy of textual textiles and textile texts. 

The second new project, tentatively entitled Late Witnesses and Medieval Literary History, takes on the awkward fringes of the medieval corpus: Old English after the Conquest, Latin when the vernacular has already risen, verse histories when prose is supposed to be the vehicle for truth, Arthurian romances after the death of Arthur. Medievalists, and indeed literary scholars more broadly, have a Janus-faced obsession with origins and teloi. We seek the first glimmers of novelty and arrows pointing towards progress, which we render (even if unwittingly) as roughly equivalent to modernity. Late witnesses, a term that refers to tardy copies of an earlier text or belated entries into moribund traditions, don’t advance either pursuit. They follow their forebears, but they do not represent the achievement of something nascent. Thus, they are usually treated as a footnote rather than a central concern. This book will show how late witnesses are a site of fantasy, sublimation, and resistance to the teleology of literary history.  

Her articles about everything from time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the treachery of incomprehensible English to the relationship of genre to purgatory have appeared or are forthcoming in in ELH, New Literary History, New Medieval Literatures, JMEMS, and Viator, among other venues (see publication list below). She is also the co-host (with Dr. Emma Claussen) of Proust Curious, a podcast miniseries about the experience of reading In Search of Lost Time as expert non-experts, releasted in partnership with Public Books.

Publications

“Towards a Taxonomy of Interpolation.” Textual Cultures (forthcoming 2025).

Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past. Cornell University Press, 2024.

“The Character of Time in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” ELH 91.2 (2024): 285–314.

“Interpolation as Critical Category.” New Literary History 53.1 (2022): 1–32.

“Lawman’s Vision of History: Sources and Figuration in the Brut.” New Medieval Literatures 22 (2022): 55–90.

“A Pilgrimage to Purgatory: Overcoming Doubt through Vernacular Narrative Conventions in the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 51.1 (2021): 9–35. Special issue: Pilgrimage and Textual Culture, ed. Anthony Bale and Kathryne Beebe.

Medieval Re-Creation: Acts of Recycling, Revision, and Relocation. The Medieval Globe 6.1 (2020). Co-edited with Joseph Shack. Special issue including a co-written introduction. Also published as Recreating the Medieval Globe (ARC Humanities Press, 2020).

“Miscellaneous Minor Manuscripts: Reconstructing a Broken Volume of Jean de Vignay’s Miroir Historial.” Harvard Library Bulletin 28.2 (2019, dated 2018): 81–96.

“Translation and Power in Lawman’s Brut.” Arthuriana 27.3 (2017): 3–23.

“A Tool for Exemplary Pastoral Care: Three Booklets of the Edwardes Manuscript in Context.” Manuscript Studies 2.2 (2017): 296–327.

“A Geste for the King: Wace’s Epic Experiment in the Roman de Rou.” Viator 46.3 (2015): 41–59.