Meet a Medievalist Maker: Kristen Haas Curtis
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
Greetings from Switzerland, GuMM world! I’m Kristen Haas Curtis, a medievalist, an adaptation scholar, and a cartoonist.
Process:
My main scholarly-adjacent creative practice involves playing with Chaucerian adaptation through various approaches including comics and short stories. From early in my studies, I was inspired by Chaucer’s reputation as an adapter of older texts, and this led to both my interest in studying adaptations of his work and in creating adaptations of my own, whether intended to be publicly shared or just for my own entertainment.
On the theoretical side, my work is heavily influenced by two central ideas from Linda Hutcheon: the first was her recognition that “adaptation” as a term can be applied to both the product/text being created and to the activity of creating this product. The second was her description of adaptation as a “double process” made up of two distinct acts: the interpretation of an existing text and the (re)creation of the existing text influenced by this interpretation. For me, these two concepts highlight the value of treating adaptation as an active process in which one might engage and encourage further rumination on and questioning of my own personal experience of interpretation.
As a scholar who tends to spend vast amounts of time with individual texts, I am also particularly interested in the ways in which retelling an existing text fosters an experience I have been thinking of as “unknowing” a text. The creative act of adaptation enables me to consider the text from a completely different perspective and thus experience it in a completely different way, similar to the way in which showing a guest around your hometown allows you to see it fresh again as well, no matter how long you have lived there.
In my comics work, I have also been influenced by cartoonist Matt Madden and his work on cartooning with creative constraints. His best known work, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005), demonstrates the rich variability available to explore in even the simplest story. In his workshops on experimenting with creative constraints, I often find myself going back to Chaucerian adaptation as a starting point from which to apply Madden’s prompts and suggestions. In fact, I am using one image that I created as part of one of his workshops as my current postcard/business card:
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Sixty Seconds
Project: I have a few adaptation projects in various states of completion right now, including a novella adaptation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a sci-fi short story loosely retelling The Knight’s Tale, and a very meta comics project which I was creating alongside my doctoral research and which has been on hiatus for a couple years now. It is this project that I want to introduce here today, in part because I am eager to start rethinking it now that my dissertation and viva are completed.
My (unfinished) comic Repainting the Lion was designed to bring together multiple threads, including brief adaptations of texts and passages from my dissertation corpus, personal observations of the process of research itself, and my own particular experience doing doctoral work in Switzerland. To accomplish these goals, I cast the Wife of Bath as the ghostly presence haunting my doctoral work. Rather than being a comic retelling of Chaucer’s text, my adaptation (like several of the others considered in this dissertation) removes the Wife from her Chaucerian context and reinterprets her in a new story. In this case, my Wife of Bath is an adapted character informed by her Chaucerian construction and set in conversation with myself as a researcher as well as with other versions of her character as portrayed in the texts explored in my thesis. Repainting the Lion was created and published online in serial form as one of my contributions to the COMMode social media presence. The comic was initially shared at a rate of one to three pages per month for the first two years of the project. Though posting frequency diminished as my academic writing took priority, I have kept extensive notes for several undrawn pages which I hope to return to in the future.
Peek:
Prompt:
This is the part of the blog post where we share a creative exercise for you to play with that can be completed in around fifteen minutes and uses readily available supplies. While it would be difficult (but not impossible I bet) to pull off an adaptation in that time, I thought we might design paper dolls of a character we feel strongly about, using a basic template to speed up the drawing process.
Below, you will find a template with light-colored outlines followed by two examples of characters that I created using this template. The template gives your guidelines for drawing a character along with a wardrobe of a top, a bottom, and even a bag for you to customize. Time to play! You can print the template out or save and edit it digitally. You can keep things historically accurate or gleefully anachronistic, or even a combination of the two!
Character creation in action!
I used the template to create “Mallrat Criseyde” and a “Beach Holiday Wife of Bath.” Who will you create? We can’t wait to meet them! If you feel like sharing your creations online, don’t forget to use our hashtags: #Gummies and #GuildMedMak or tag us in them!
My personal recommended reading:
Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2013.
Matt Madden. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Jonathan Cape, 2006.
