Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England
History, Poetry, and Performance

Sarah Elliott Novacich explores the ways in which the plots of sacred history were preserved and repurposed in Medieval English literature.

Sarah Elliott Novacich (Author)

9781107177055, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 March 2017

230 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.46 kg

'The examples she [Novacich] chooses out of representations of sacred history in drama and poetry offer an elegant case study of how literature might explicate a historical crisis, providing a brilliant argument for even greater exchange between fields in the humanities.' Hannah Leah Crummé, Renaissance Quarterly

Sarah Elliott Novacich explores how medieval thinkers pondered the ethics and pleasures of the archive. She traces three episodes of sacred history - the loss of Eden, the loading of Noah's ark, and the Harrowing of Hell - across works of poetry, performance records, and iconography in order to demonstrate how medieval artists turned to sacred history to think through aspects of cultural transmission. Performances of the loss of Eden blur the relationship between original and record; stories of Noah's ark foreground the difficulty of compiling inventories; and engagements with the Harrowing of Hell suggest the impossibility of separating the past from the present. Reading Middle English plays alongside chronicles, poetry, and works of visual art, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England considers how poetic form, staging logistics, and the status of performance all contribute to our understanding of the ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the archive.

1. Model worlds
2. Ark and archive
3. Uxor Noe and the drowned
4. Infernal archive
5. The Harrowing of Hell: closure and rehearsal.

Subject Areas: Christianity [HRC], Oral history [HBTD], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD], Historiography [HBAH]