‘Texts and Authors’ provides a deliberately wide framework for MEMS researchers to consider a multitude of issues pertaining to the study of premodern literary cultures. Though drawn from a variety of historical and literary schools, we thoroughly embrace MEMS’s interdisciplinary ethos: we have taken the ‘linguistic turn’, and now aim to confront its legacy. As modern scholars, how might we choose and combine the array of interpretive lenses available for the study of texts and authors? This MEMS Lab offers a space to ponder the possibilities and limits of historical and literary analysis in our attempts to comprehend the past, taking in questions of authorship, political and cultural context, genre and audience expectation, transmission and reception, truth and fictionality, rhetoric and plausibility, memory, and narrative construction.