ABSTRACT
Annotation is ordinarily regarded in medieval vernacular literary studies as a blameless, selfless work of mediation between what is complacently called the “otherness” of medieval literary texts and their world and those of modern readers, a labor that is considered virtuous precisely because it does not lend itself to theoretical or interpretive display. Ralph Hanna has argued that annotation is “a socially sanctioned form of aggression, directed at both the community which sanctions annotation and the text which inspires it.” The very grammar of annotation is strangely evasive: it is phrasal, not clausal, eschewing open predication, and largely confined to the appositive mode. Annotation as normally practiced has special difficulty, in other words, representing the temporal dimension of the author’s production, either across what might be called fictive time, the unfolding of a narrative sequence, or within the actual time over which the work was made.
