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Archival research has always been a cornerstone of medieval studies, but recent work has reinvigorated the field by transforming our understanding of the lives of late-medieval authors and people alike. The discovery of new evidence in the case of Cecily Chaumpaigne and Geoffrey Chaucer, contentious debates around identifying "Chaucer's Scribe" Adam Pinkhurst and recovery of figures such as Eleanor Rykener and the rebels of 1381 all demonstrate how archival research enriches our understanding of the medieval past. This thread invites contributions that foster new understandings of lives in the archives and bring a theoretical eye to the practice of archival research itself. Proposals might address new microhistories of medieval figures; the need for what Saidiya Hartman names "critical fabulation" to address archival silences and erasures; the colonial and imperialist history of institutions such as the National Archives; the archival lives of poets such as Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate; medieval manuscripts as technologies of the archive; the limits of empirical history as an analytic for literary history; and theorizations of archival "discovery" as a colonial epistemology.
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