The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones's second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones's visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones's Library, this volume reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in Modernist and Medieval Studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages--including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography--to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponised in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore-up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

About the Author
Francesca Brooks is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York. She has previously published on sensory perceptions of the early medieval liturgy in England, the influence of liturgical innovation on vernacular Passion poetry (both medieval and modernist), and the crafting of sound in the riddles of the Old English Exeter Book. Dr Brooks teaches both medieval and modern literature and is interested in the intersections of critical and creative practice.

Reviews
Poet of the Medieval Modern is a welcome and necessary study of how Old English language and history enabled Jones to think through his artistic, religious, and cultural preoccupations. * Paul Robichaud, Albertus Magnus College, Modern Philology *
Poet of the Medieval Modern is an impressive and worthwhile read for its original archival research,...While this monograph will most deeply interest Jones scholars, other readers interested in modernist engagements with early medieval texts and modernist re-imaginings of history will find themselves rewarded with fresh insights into both topics through the extraordinary depth of Jones's poetry. * Journal of Modern Literature *


Awards
Winner of Winner, 2023 University English Book Prize.



Book Information
ISBN 9780198860136
Author Francesca Brooks
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 516g
Dimensions(mm) 208mm * 145mm * 25mm