Suggested Reading

Fran Brooks on Edwin Morgan's scrapbooking practices, and her own creative-critical responses.

Incorporating thinking pulled from creativity research and comics theory, this essay explores the value of play and creativity in learning environments. The essay is constructed in two parts: the main body is presented in comic form and then followed by a second section containing instructions and relevant worksheets for an adaptation exercise designed for classroom use.

In this interview conducted by Mohamed Karim Dhouib, author and medievalist Kim Zarins discusses her young adult novel Sometimes We Tell the Truth (2016), a contemporary retelling of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The novel reimagines Chaucer’s iconic pilgrims as modern teenagers on a bus trip to Washington, D.C. Zarins reflects on the process of adaptation, such as portraying the Pardoner as intersex—while emphasizing the pedagogical value of retellings in making medieval literature more accessible. She advocates for inclusive approaches to teaching and explains how her own novel has inspired student engagement with Chaucer. The conversation also delves into Zarins’ interactive classroom strategies that help students form meaningful connections with premodern texts. The interview ultimately reveals how creative adaptations and innovative teaching methods can help contemporary audiences access, discover, and appreciate both the striking differences and surprising similarities between Chaucer’s era and today.

The essay is based on two paintings, it examines how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides a critical framework for understanding contemporary moral and epistemological failures. Through the lens of the Green Knight as a monstrous figure embodying both judgment and transformative grace, I analyze three recent events that exemplify modern evasions of moral reckoning: Richard Dawkins' rigid empiricism and dismissal of symbolic thought, Archbishop Justin Welby's institutional protection over justice in response to abuse allegations, and the mechanized violence of drone warfare that distances aggressors from the human consequences of their actions. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of symbolism and Slavoj Žižek's theorization of Christ as monstrous rupture, I argue that the Green Knight represents a necessary disruption to ideological stability—a force that refuses to allow individuals to remain comfortable within their inherited frameworks. The essay contends that contemporary figures of authority, like Gawain's pentangle, construct artificial systems of certainty that ultimately fail when confronted with moral complexity. By "puncturing the fantasy" of both medieval romance and modern rationalism, I demonstrate how the poem's central figure challenges us to recognize perception itself as "a spike turned inward"—a violence we enact upon ourselves in pursuit of certainty. In an age of algorithmic chaos, institutional corruption, and dehumanized warfare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains urgently relevant, offering not nostalgia but a medieval mirror reflecting our contemporary inability to submit ourselves to genuine transformation.

Available online here.

This article explores what we can learn from creative responses to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which comprises a growing visual language, inclusive of the original images of the codex, the illustrations of popular translations, contemporary artworks that respond to the poem, and the recent film adaptation.

See also the website for the project under digital resources below.

This article looks at how ecocritical readings of The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, and Exeter Book riddles can inspire an ‘ecocreative’ way of rewriting and reimagining Old English verse. It puts ecocritical interpretations into creative practice by translating the speeches of the wanderer, wife, wind, water, and ice into one another and creating a more ‘ecological’ lyric voice that is at once human and more-than-human. This new creative-critical approach plays across the generic, gendered, and ontological boundaries set in place by previous scholarly, editorial, and translational practices. In the process, it remakes Old English texts as contemporary, polyphonic ecopoems.

This essay examines strategies to promote learning by doing in an Arthurian Traditions course. The focus is on how to introduce creative writing students to writerly inquiries as a means to read medieval texts, and at the same time, how to introduce critical literary students to creative-criticism. Concepts of the auctor and the process of imitatio become central in analysing the mechanics and craft of texts and of the place for repetition and revision in the literary Tradition. Examples of how students create an Arthurian text and then edit that text are shared.

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.

A playful creative-critical account of the medieval world, using the words of medieval travel writing, taking the readers from England to the Antipodes and beyond.

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.

A new creative-critical history of England told through poems as portals to the past.

This manual uses the medieval past to teach modern scholars how to succeed in public engagement. Combining a careful study of public engagement in Europe between 1000 and 1500 with the author’s experiences working at a public research library, this book shows medievalists how to use mindsets, approaches, and practices from the Middle Ages to build productive connections with diverse publics beyond academia. To do so, it describes the systemic roadblocks preventing effective public engagement in the academy; offers four medieval solutions to those issues from the work of prominent intellectuals and anonymous laypeople from medieval Europe; and suggests how scholars can incorporate those solutions into their professional development.

A novel exploring the lives of English mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, including their meeting at Julian's anchoress cell in Norwich in 1413, and the genesis of their books, Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe.

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)

This collection explores a wide variety of creative-critical work as it applies to different disciplines. The introduction, in particular, plays with both form and theory as it attempts to further expand the possibilities unlocked by a practice of creative-criticism. The book is structured around a large number of short sections, making it particularly easy to dip in and out of.  

This chapter reflects on the ways in which creative and academic writing can speak to each other as they offer different ways into a question or text of interest and different experiences of knowing/not-knowing for the writer. 

This book chapter provides the reader with an explication of the creative and critical process of translating an Old English poem known as The Order of the World. It situates the careful 'craft' of translation within the slow scholarship movement.