What is known about how a text is transmitted affects the evaluation of its content. And evaluation and classification of content in turn affect the interpretation of words and language. Literary historians must decide what it is they have in front of them using internal and, where available, external evidence too. Lexicon, syntax, metrics, topoi, generic markers, and more, all go into the taxonomic decision. And once a work has a place in some sort of scholarly taxonomy it may then be used (or abused). A text's nature and classification may also be interpreted in widely divergent ways by scholars who never engage each others' views. Near the end of the long period this volume covers (third century bc – eighth century ad) the Letters of Frodebert and Importunus, texts that some regard as serious documents and others as obvious parodies, provide a case study of such a problem. Commentary on them can easily expand to book-length. My concern here will be to pinpoint the nature of a late text of controversial content, genre and characteristics (learned/vulgar, literary/colloquial, ecclesiastical/secular, written/oral, Latin/Romance). My discussion will begin with the mise en scène and continue with series of limited textual and interpretative problems showing how arguments even about small philological points affect much broader assumptions about what these texts are.