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Book cover for Beyond Medieval Archives open access

Publication date: 1 January 2027

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781806552375

Number of illustrations: 42

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Beyond Medieval Archives

Rethinking the medieval archive through creative and critical practice

Francesca Brooks (Editor),  Carl Kears (Editor)

Beyond Medieval Archives hopes to open the field of medieval studies to more diverse, dynamic and innovative forms of creativity, criticism, publication and collective action in response to the resonance of its archives. Archives of the Middle Ages are sites of immense creative and collaborative potential. They also continue to be important sites for constructing, remaking and even deconstructing a variety of social and political identities.

The book presents a diverse range of critical approaches to the archive on local, global, communal and activist-artistic fronts, and is informed by archival methods that emerge from workshops, translation practice, medieval-modern poetic practice, creative writing, publishing history, as well as those of the exhibition and the installation. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book rethinks the boundaries of the medieval archive (both temporal and institutional) and argues for an expanded understanding of new scholarship with creative practice at its core.

Collected in this volume are essays by world-leading scholars, prize-winning poets and writers, as well as previously unpublished work by artists, which all examine archives as caches of knowledge. There are collaborative dialogues that approach bodies, bones and landscapes as domains that form new archives over time. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past – whether from the perspective of class, Queer Studies or Indigenous history – and challenge the ongoing and urgent issue of archival access.

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