When Slow Scholarship was published in September 2019, global pandemics were still more likely to be the subject of speculative fiction than the nightly news. I offer this observation as caveat and context, to remind readers and myself that the world this book was written in does not exist anymore. Moreover, between the COVID-19 pandemic, the changing nature of scholarship and academic work at my small university in southeastern Ohio (and the profession at large), and the general sense of dis-ease that has marked my two years of engagement with this collection, I am not the scholar who was asked to review this book. But returning to it in the midst of a pandemic that still rages across the world—now in its Omicron variant and hurtling toward whatever horror the Greek alphabet still holds in store for us—I find these essays stand as both a monument to a different moment and a balm to an academic mind now suspicious of the very possibility of academic endeavors in the neoliberal university.In her introduction, Catherine Karkov posits a call to “slow scholarship”: the possibility of rejecting the ceaseless academic production required by the grind of the job market, the tenure track, and, in the UK, the Research Excellence Framework. Indeed, the REF haunts this collection, which began as a series of conference panels at the 2014 Leeds International Medieval Congress. The twin “virtues” of speed and novelty that the REF prioritizes, Karkov notes, are deeply detrimental to the scholarship it purports to incentivize. Indeed, if we cannot revisit our earlier work, revise our point of view based on new information or simply on our own continued growth as thinkers, readers, and writers, then what is the point of doing scholarship at all?Importantly, slow scholarship is not antidigital. Rather, “the digital needs slow thinking” (p. 4). For Karkov and her contributors, this observation applies as much to the digital surrogates we create as it does to the digital environments we increasingly find ourselves in. Digital surrogates, Karkov avers, are “no substitute for working with the things, books, monuments, and places we study and teach” (p. 4). On the one hand, this observation has an aphoristic quality, one all too familiar to anyone attempting to secure funding for research trips to manuscript archives. In 2022, on the other hand, heading into the third year of the pandemic, and—at least in North America—quite isolated from any objects that can't be accessed through digital means, these words read differently than they must have in 2019. Similarly, 2022 changes the tenor of Karkov's musings on digital meeting spaces: “The digital can often serve only to isolate and separate us. Online discussions are not a replacement for personal interaction with fellow students and scholars. . . . The virtual at its worst is a place of isolation, anonymity, surveillance and violence” (p. 4). I found these observations resonant with new meaning, having now lived through two years of Zoom classes, conferences, and meetings, and resisted (for now) the implementation of digital test-taking technology for which the surveillance potential puts the panopticon to shame. But her words also call to mind the way that panopticism can lead us to police ourselves and one another, surveilling digital presence or lack thereof, inadvertently turning new ways of connection into the very “output” and “impact” that, in the form of the REF, we find so stifling. Yet what we will no doubt remember as the “Zoom Era” has another lesson for academics that might not have been clear in 2019: nondigital presence has a variety of vicissitudes not captured in the healthy debate and discussion that we nostalgically remember. Indeed, the potential of inclusivity with Zoom conferences reminds us that in-person attendance was and remains problematic for many colleagues.The volume begins with Lara Eggleton's “Research as Folly, or, How to Productively Ruin Your Research.” Eggleton envisions slow scholarship as a form of ruin—that is, “a structure that becomes naturally subsumed and integrated into its surroundings, embodying changes to the researcher and her chosen subjects or objects over time” (p. 18). Eggleton's work is framed by her position as one of the academic “precariat”—her necessarily slower production of scholarship has fundamentally changed her relationship to her object of study, the Alhambra. In particular, she finds that her not-quite- and para-academic activities can be both personally meaningful and create the engagement, writing, and impact that the REF claims to value.In the section Slow Words, a pair of essays by James Paz and Chris Jones ponder the way that the personal inflects the scholarly. In “Translating The Order of the World in My Own Time,” Paz prioritizes the way process might inform the scholarly products so prized by our institutions. The result is a poetic piece about the production of poetry, what makes both an Old English poem and its translation a piece of poetic wonder. Paz translates for himself, and in ruminating on his perpetual return “each dawn” “to my slow translation, to the act of re-creation” (p. 44), he reminds us that at the core of medieval literary study is the way that words always escape us, always push us beyond what modern English can express. Paz's approach to translation thus resists the fictive closure of certainty and the neoliberal culture of assessment at the same time. Similarly, Chris Jones begins his “Re-lining the Grave” with a mystery: “We do not know who speaks to us” (p. 53). Jones's “slow reading” of the Old English poem emphasizes a slow translation that reveals the complexities of a linguistic encounter with the text. Jones beautifully demonstrates the strangeness of the temporal unfolding of the reading of Old English poetry. As he moves to the second line of the poem, for example, he writes “Four more words. You were dative, but you have become nominative. Then, an object, indirectly. Now, a subject. But a passive subject. The speaker or if not the speaker then at least the absent builder, built before you were born. What could she possibly have known of you before you were born?” (p. 54). Jones's narration of his reading reveals the indeterminacy of translation, the way that one word is always, inevitably, more than one—just as one time is always, inevitably, more than one time. Reaching back into his own past, his own first encounters with the graves of his grandparents, Jones poignantly shows that scholarly memory encompasses more than just words in a dictionary.In the section on Slow Looking, Heather Pulliam and Catherine Karkov write about the multiplicity of meanings that emerge from the encounter with physical artifacts of the Middle Ages. In so doing, they advocate for a more embodied approach to our studies, one that prioritizes the kinds of momentary visions that emerge from being with an artifact in place. Pulliam helpfully begins her essay, “Rethinking Slow Looking,” by breaking down the binaries that attend the idea of slow looking. She is able to do so in part because of her embodied experience of the Clonmacoise cross stones in place: she doesn't see them “as intended” but rather while also existing as a person, subject to the vicissitudes of light, weather, and the indomitable energy of her toddler. Slow looking, she argues, needn't take one form: rather, it can be extended across days or even years; it can be embodied; it can be communal—whether with monks or toddlers. A moment immortalized in a photo might illuminate one kind of looking, and the long lifetime of living with an artifact another. Karkov's exploration of the Ruthwell cross, “Thinking about Stone,” organizes itself around the primal elements, earth, fire, water, and air. She begins from the premise that there is something fundamentally elusive about the cross that animates our engagement with it. Karkov engages precisely “those meanings that circle the cross, that spiral backwards and forwards through history, that haunt the cross and its history, and that can't always be pinned down within historical sources” (pp. 101–102). By juxtaposing possibilities rather than certainties, Karkov holds meaning in stasis, without reducing it to a single point.In the final section of the book, Slow Manuscripts, Karen Jolly and Andrew Prescott take aim at the seemingly ubiquitous association of the digital with the fast. Jolly's essay, “Letter by Letter,” focuses on the slow process of transcription from a digital surrogate, and how the art of it, a skill built over a lifetime, makes transcription a kind of interpretation. Jolly's process-oriented work transcribing from a digitized manuscript engages a sense of community that exceeds her own university or even field, and reminds her of the importance of the historical community for which the manuscript was written. She also raises an important question: what is lost when we do not have the capacity for serendipitous exchange? In her case, it's quite clear: the “personal encounters and scholarly conversations” surrounding her project led an American pop culture expert to design a software program for her transcription project that is now being adapted for use by scholars of the Hawaiian language (p. 140). Andrew Prescott's contribution, “Slow Digitization and the Battle of the Books,” raises questions about the sacrifices that are made in the quest for speedy digitization of important records. These range from restrictive forms of photography to restrictive databases of knowledge, but in any case, remind us that we need to consider carefully what the real purpose of digitization is before it is undertaken.Reading Slow Scholarship in 2022 is a very different experience, I expect, than reading it when it was written. But it also drives home how difficult it is—in any world—to imagine scholarship differently. At many institutions in the US, for example, business continues more or less as usual, and two years into the pandemic with nearly a million dead in the US alone, tenure clocks and post-tenure reviews resume, to borrow an Old English phrase, as if it never were. I often wonder if I learned too late that life and work are hardly so separable as the modern university might want to believe. These essays offer a stunningly prescient reminder that it has always been so, and that there may be much to gain by slowing down and asking more questions.