Suggested Reading

On this page you can find a selection of suggested resources about medievalist creative-critical practice.

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Articles

  • This article is centred upon seven new poems from Varnam’s poetry project inspired by the women of Beowulf. To contextualise the project, the poems are framed with a creative-critical reflection on their genesis in her undergraduate Beowulf class, where Varnam teaches the original poem through modern translation, adaptation, and creative response. Varnam discusses her indebtedness to feminist scholarship on the ‘overwhelmingly masculine’ nature of Beowulf (Overing 1990) and briefly surveys recent feminist translations and adaptations. She proposes her poetry as a form of creative close reading and an example of Lees and Overing’s ‘contemporary medieval in practice’ (Lees and Overing 2019). She also offers short notes on the poems and their relationship to questions of gender, voice, and autonomy.

Monographs

  • A bestselling collection of personal essays, which interweave memoir, medieval literature and history. A first-generation academic uses her own experiences of love, loss, motherhood, addiction and grief to open a window on the medieval world.

Edited Collections

  • This volume contains chapters that reflect upon ‘fostering creative engagements with the medieval and early modern past and its own literary and artistic products’ (p. 7). The collective focus of these chapters is on ‘the intersection between creative and critical practice and the value of these activities for new engagements with the early English past’ (p. 10). The chapters that engage with creative-critical responses to medieval literature and culture are as follows:

    • Kline, Daniel T., ‘Gamifying the Canterbury Tales 1: Adopt- a- Pilgrim, Harry Bailley's Game, and an RPG Canterbury Tales’ (pp. 23-40)

    • Robinson, Olivia, ‘Creating Medieval Drama: Student Actors, Public Audiences, and Middle English Plays’ (pp. 53-62)

    • Brookman, Helen, ‘“Arthurian Transformations”: Undergraduate Students Curating a Digital Exhibition in an Interdisciplinary Medievalism Module’ (pp. 75-88)

    • Salisbury, Matthew Cheung, ‘Formation from “Fragments”: Learning about Twelfth-Century Liturgy Through Creative Engagement with Evidence’ (pp. 99-108)

    • Wakelin, Daniel, ‘Redesigning the Medieval Book’ (pp. 109-126)

Websites and Digital Resources

  • The Creative Critical website can be accessed following this link: https://creativecritical.net/

    The Creative Critical website hosts blogposts reflecting on creative-critical practice (particularly written forms of creative-critical practice) under three headings: ‘Writing’, ‘Teaching’, and ‘Method’. It also links to Beyond Criticism Editions published through the independent Boiler House Press, which publishes work that ‘explores the new forms that literary criticism might take in the 21st century’.