Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics

Caroline Bergvall’s celebrated trilogy of interdisciplinary medievalist texts and projects—Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), and Alisoun Sings (2019)—documents methods of reading and making that are poetically and politically alert, critically and culturally aware, linguistically attuned, and historically engaged.

Drawing on the wide-ranging body of criticism dedicated to Bergvall’s work and material from Bergvall’s archive, together with newly commissioned texts by scholars, theorists, linguists, translators, and poets, this book situates the trilogy in relation to key themes including mixed temporalities; interdisciplinarity and performance; art and activism; and the geopolitical, psychosexual, and social complexities of subjectivity. It follows routes laid down by the trilogy to move between the medieval past and our contemporary moment to uncover new forms of encounter and exchange.

Joshua Davies is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the Department of English at King’s College London and published Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages in 2018.

Caroline Bergvall, Global Professorial Fellow, Queen Mary University London, is an award-winning poet, artist, and performer. She has an interdisciplinary practice, working across artforms, media, and languages in a wide range of contexts.