In her book, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, Carolyn Dinshaw offers a protracted critique of the modernist temporal project and its deeply heteronormative legacies. Uncovering instead the myriad ways of ‘being in time’ as experienced within and through medieval texts, in her discussion Dinshaw also reminds us what knowledge of those multiple ‘beings in time’ is able to teach us about the contingency of temporality within our own era. As Dinshaw rightly points out, any close scrutiny of the ‘stories’ of the past – whether literary, historical or those countless blurrings between the two – can deeply problematize the notion of the ‘pastness of the past’, ultimately revealing a pastness that is, in fact, ever present and synchronous.

The expression ‘being in time’, of course, not only signifies the different ways in which any given human in any given cultural situation actually experiences time, but also interrogates the notion of ‘time’ as a single reified entity, with its connotations of organizing, arranging, ordering and policing space and the operations of those who occupy it. For Dinshaw, the irreducible correlation between our notions of time and space ‘serves to emphasize for us that time and space are inextricably linked, and that temporal disjunctions implicate the disposition of bodies in space’. The ‘temporal disjunctions’ here referred to by Dinshaw allude to a particularly modernist stance (in her terms, the ‘modernist thicket’), the influence of which continues to be felt within our own ‘now’, and which, amongst other things, posits an acute temporal divide between the premodern and modern ‘periods’.