Encountering the Dartmouth Brut in the Midst of History

The texts and manuscripts of the Middle English prose Brut resist easy classification, largely because they have resulted from a long and ongoing history of re-writing. The articles in this volume grapple with these dynamics by bringing comparative perspectives to a single manuscript. In this afterword, I seek to make clear some of the pluralities at the heart of encountering the digital, physical, and always contingent Brut. I highlight the complexities of transmission with an example of how one late medieval reader responded not to the text at hand, but rather to his memories or expectations of other histories and other texts.