IN WRITING of Ælfric's Colloquy, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe begins by analyzing the oft-quoted and apparently straightforward injunction, ‘esto quod es’ [be what you are]. In Katherine's reading, ‘Be what you are’ becomes not just an easy-to-translate phrase for Latin learners, but a command to embrace their new identity through the many different practices that turn oblates into monks. Her focus on a single innocuous phrase becomes a fulcrum that opens up her inquiry to larger questions of epistemology and identity formation, rooted in the quotidian practices of the monastic schoolroom. The mundane details of everyday life, routinely overlooked when we ask big questions, become the foundation for understanding an entire worldview: to use Katherine's phrase, they have other work to do. What ‘esto quod es’ means was never in dispute, but Katherine made us rethink how it means, unpacking one of the simplest phrases in Anglo-Latin literature to reveal a complex site that constitutes monastic identity.

This keen ability to deduce large structures – like identity, agency, subjectivity – from the easily overlooked details of the everyday characterizes all of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe's work. Seemingly unremarkable facets of early English culture, from punctuation to formulaic language, become the foundation for a complete reorientation of the material that introduces a mode of investigation that was not previously possible. In other words, Katherine pioneered a methodology that used some of the medievalist’s strongest tools, philology and textual criticism, to reconstruct entire edi-fices of medieval thought. By focusing on minute pedestrian details of composition, for example, we can uncover the assumptions that went (quite literally) without saying for medieval scribes, but are opaque to modern scholars.