Medieval re-creation and translation in Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman’s archives: A dialogue

AbstractThis dialogue brings together two archives: the Derek Jarman collection at Tate Britain and the Edwin Morgan manuscripts at the University of Glasgow Library Archives and Special Collections. Both Jarman and Morgan were queer artists who reforged the medieval past through visual and verbal processes, including scrapbooking, collage, and translation. The dialogue also brings together two critics, Francesca Brooks and E.K. Myerson, who have been responding to these archives through a combination of traditional scholarship and creative practice. Both in their approach to the medieval past and in their multimedia, visio-verbal practices, Jarman and Morgan’s archives are generative, fluid, and expansive spaces that invite embodied, affective, and creative responses. The dialogue explores what it means to be a medievalist working in the modern archive and how our critical approaches to the medieval subjects of our research might be changed and transformed by this work.