In my readings of the Lives of Eustace and Alban in Chapter Five I outlined how community is not simply used as a predicate or foundation for the text but also in an important sense emerges from it, as the ultimate – but inevitably deferred and incomplete – consummation of the text's ideological project. Community is thus often incorporated into the text as part of a representational ethos that attempts to reproduce and consolidate for the reader or listener a sense of participation in a collective body united in faith, a sense that is arrived at by textually-mediated identifications of various kinds.

I will now consider how such identifications might be thought about in connection with modern reading practices and, more specifically, in relation to the forms of community that could emerge from such reading practices. In so doing, I would like to consider the work of Carolyn Dinshaw, whose book, Getting Medieval, endeavours to theorize community as part of the relationship between the medieval past and the postmodern present. Dinshaw construes the postmodern relationship to the past – to the medieval past in particular – in terms of queer community: a community formed in relation to sex as a heterogeneous and indeterminate category as opposed to a category that is fixed or knowable. This, claims Dinshaw, responds to a ‘queer historical impulse’ inclined toward the making of connections across time between, on the one hand, that which is excluded by the sexual categories of the past and, on the other hand, that which is left out of sexual categories in the present.