Odd that fiction would be yet another invention claimed for modernity. Yes, that's the way modernity's game is played; and still I marvel that our modernist colleagues never seem tired of playing it, or insisting on the ontology of their favorite fetish. Julie Orlemanski and Michelle Karnes contest this modernist heuristic and insist instead on fiction's contingency and the crucial role of the reader in its determination, thereby helping to dismantle a hierarchy that requires constant assertions of epistemological inventio to keep itself propped up. In fiction as in all things, medieval texts refuse to operate within the anachronistic generic categories that they have been retroactively assigned.