Understanding Eleanor is a project researching and writing the life of Eleanor Rykener, a transfem who lived in fourteenth-century London. Everything we know about Eleanor is from the record of their interrogation. Like many trans people, theirs is a life utterly erased by fears and desires of those around them.
   I want to help people understand Eleanor. Mine is an intimate history, where readers build an affective relationship with the past. It uses experimental methods and unorthodox sources to tell Eleanor's life in the everyday, embodied detail with which it was lived.