Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the Medieval Archive through Creative and Critical Practice

Beyond Medieval Archives includes critical essays, creative reflections, dialogue pieces and creative-critical collaborations from medievalists, poets, artists and writers. The book argues that by considering the archive in new ways from the perspective of Medieval Studies and creative practice, we can instigate a more diverse range of critical approaches to the archive as a site of immense creative potential. Contributions to this volume engage with archives as repositories existing within and beyond institutions, as more makeshift assemblies of materials and artefacts, and as conceptual and theoretical frameworks. The archive emerges here, we argue, as a space where revelation and discovery are haunted by the provocations of silence and omission. Collected in this volume are essays by world-leading scholars and reflections by prize-winning poets and artists that examine archives as caches of knowledge. There are collaborative dialogues that approach bodies, bones and landscapes as domains that become archives over time. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past, while challenging understandings and intuitions about the issues of archival access.

By engaging with the archive – contemporary, poetic, artistic – with and through medieval literature and culture, this collection expands the scope of the creative-critical archive itself. It does this by including accounts of creative projects by poets, artists and medievalists, which are yet to be documented in published form. It argues that by placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation we can better trace the emergence of medieval literature and culture in the modern and contemporary archive; use the postmedieval archive to reread, or reconfigure, the material of the medieval past; and productively examine how the archives of the Middle Ages are reforged through creative work.