The Epilogue reviews how—after much anarchic pulling apart—the Harley miscellany comes together as a literary-cartographic compilation. Sacred space manifests here as a Hereford-centred ecclesiastical regionalism. Harley 2253 is famous for other genres, but saints’ lives govern its undertaking. Its saintly roster proves diverse (biblical/medieval; foreign/domestic; political/parodic), but committed to locally grounded sanctity. Providing a focal point for ‘Ye Goon to … Hereford?’ is St Thomas Cantilupe, a Hereford bishop (canonized 1320) whose cathedral shrine competed on even footing, for a while, with the royal-associated cult of Archbishop Thomas Becket, whose Canterbury shrine dominates English literary history (via Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) and cultural geography. Cantilupe’s fortunes recall those of the Harley manuscript within literary studies; both acquire meaning via their regionalist character. Reading Harley 2253 and Hereford Cathedral together challenges the dominance of Becket, Chaucer, and Canterbury Cathedral. To seek St Thomas of Hereford in the Harley manuscript is to borrow trouble codicologically—he won’t be found, any more than Becket’s shrine is reached by Chaucer’s Pilgrims. But pursuing his absent presence, in a book that privileges sanctified geography by planting local saints at threshold locations, does move us towards Hereford Cathedral, where a famous mappamundi awaits those approaching Cantilupe’s shrine.

Counterfactualist approaches to the past are standard in certain subdisciplines of history, and prevalent in film and fiction. But literary criticism and medieval studies have only begun to consider the phenomenon, despite counterfactual history’s potential for opening up the past in new ways. Chapter 3 risks the censure of ‘responsible’ historians by asking what implications an interweaving of genre prescription, gender ideology, and historical contingency may have for the practice of counterfactual literary medievalism. Its case study, drawn from an eclectic quire of Harley 2253, is an obscure Anglo-Norman bourde (jest, tale) known as Gilote et Johane: a genre-bending hybrid in which two damsels debate sexual mores, take lovers, outwit fathers, confound priests, advise passing wives, preach their audacious ‘lesson’ to churches full of femmes, then burst forth to spread their mobile erotic doctrine ‘across all England and Ireland’. As our narrator frames it, the tale is designed to provoke outrage and redoubled vigilance; however, Gilote et Johane's imagination of an alternative social future enables other, less deterministic species of response. Taking seriously the radical counterfactual vision presented by this rollicking ‘cautionary tale’ allows readers to re-map medieval gender relations, while reassessing Harley 2253’s place in Anglo-Norman and English literary history.

Chapter 1 proposes that the once-canonical ‘Harley Lyrics’ require literary-geographical re-contextualization. These poems’ backwater status is not native, but a consequence of the peripheral location assigned them by metropolitan narratives preoccupied with formal-genealogical influence. Harley 2253 was produced for a gentry household near Ludlow, Herefordshire, by a copyist using exemplars from across England and beyond (Paris, Avignon, Ireland). By attending to lyric transmission, and through readings of genre and geography, ‘Harley Lyrics and Hereford clerics’ demonstrates how, notwithstanding the provincial gentry setting of their copying, these adaptable poems align formally and socially with another textual community. This underlying context lies in the well-travelled secular clerks and episcopal officials of Hereford Diocese. The collective experience of such men was defined by unusually pronounced mobility, cohort solidarity, and district boosterism. But if these clerical lives, given incessant travel, are defined by spatial dislocation, so too are the Harley Lyrics preoccupied with geographical displacement. Waxing nostalgic for a ‘hom’ located vaguely ‘by west’, they idealize the figure of a beloved ‘levedi’ [lady] or ‘lef in lond’ [love in land]) who is brought into being through passionate poetic longing. Such (imported) conventions bespeak the cosmopolitanism of the Harley Lyrics, while underlining their regional orientation.

This chapter’s new analysis of Athenian kinship shows how its multiformity and malleability enabled women to manipulate patriarchal-patrilineal kinship structures and use alternative kinship modes and expressions. The chapter demonstrates the importance of maternal kin as caregivers in a demographic context which left a large minority of children fatherless and without paternal relatives, challenging a patriarchal vision of the household. It considers changes to household composition not from a demographic perspective but from an affective perspective, considering the potential influence of individuals, including women. New readings of forensic speeches and comedies show women persuading husbands to foster children from former marriages and take in vulnerable adults; voluntarily caring for others’ children; and influencing legal inclusion of individuals into the family, nominally a male prerogative. It argues that stories about suppositious children reflect anxieties about female influence on kinship as well as female sexuality.

Beginning from Lysias 1 and Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, this chapter looks at how women shaped the institution of slavery on an interpersonal level, using enslaved household members to construct and secure their own positions by establishing and maintaining a hierarchy of labour, sexuality, and dignity. It analyses the cross-generic trope of free women colluding with enslaved women and argues that it ‘refracts’ of a reality of close (though forced) interaction and cooperation in the context of profoundly unequal power relations. Similarly, portrayals of enslaved women in the sepulchral iconography of their enslavers express and reflect a complex interaction between intimacy and hierarchy. Monuments erected for enslaved nurses by their enslavers, however, emphasise inclusion rather than distinction. The chapter argues that free Athenian women’s relationships with women they kept in slavery loomed large on their emotional landscapes and were characterised by an uneasy forced intimacy which was exploited by the enslaving women.