Archival Lives/Lives in the Archive
Daniel Davies (University of Houston)

  

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.

 

submit an abstract