LAN025020 Archives

Beyond Medieval Archives

Beyond Medieval Archives approaches the archive as a site of immense creative potential. It argues that, through new perspectives from Medieval Studies and creative practice, we can instigate a more diverse range of critical approaches in which the archive emerges as a space where revelation and discovery are haunted by the provocations of silence and omission. 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.

This collection expands the scope of the creative-critical archive by engaging the archive with and through medieval literature and culture. The volume includes critical essays, creative reflections, dialogue pieces and creative-critical collaborations from medievalists, poets, artists and writers. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book traces the emergence of medieval literature and culture in the modern and contemporary archive. We can use the postmedieval archive to reread, or reconfigure, the material of the medieval past and to examine how the archives of the Middle Ages are reforged through creative work. 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.

Playing the Archive

Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground reflects on a major study inspired by the work of citizen scholar folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Opies built a vast collection of children’s street and playground games, stories, sayings, rhymes, beliefs and habits as told to them by children all over Britain. These accounts are now held in the Bodleian Libraries and were the focus and inspiration for the new study. New stories and games were gathered from today’s children, and comparisons drawn between play experiences at these two different points in time.

The book explores how the Opie Archive was made publicly available online by the project through digital images, innovative cataloguing and playful digital media interfaces, such as a red telephone kiosk at the Young V&A. Chapters analyse the ethnographic strands of the project, collecting evidence of new and old forms of play on today’s playgrounds using state-of-the-art digital methods. The book proposes new ways of thinking about changes and adaptations to play and games, theorising on the workings of interfaces, repertoires and archives. It also considers the Opies’ ways of working, landscapes of play over time, and intergenerational dialogue about play. The collection presents research evidence and theory which speak back to the often reductive public discourse around children’s play and digital media. It positions children as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.

Temptation in the Archives

Temptation in the Archives is a collection of essays by Lisa Jardine, that takes readers on a journey through the Dutch Golden Age. Through the study of such key figures as Sir Constantjin Huygens, a Dutch polymath and diplomat, we begin to see the Anglo-Dutch cultural connections that formed during this period against the backdrop of unfolding political events in England. Temptation in the Archives paints a picture of a unique relationship between the Netherlands and England in the 17th century forged through a shared experience – and reveals the lessons we can learn from it today.