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.

This book is a study of how ideas drawn from the English Middle Ages have been used to preserve and withhold freedom in the modern world. Broad in scope, it draws on canonical and ephemeral texts, including chronicles, memoirs, novels, political pamphlets, archival material, and works of history by scholars, colonizers, abolitionists, and Lost Cause apologists. Using three generations of a single family to frame its analysis, it reveals an intellectual genealogy that moves from medieval England to modern Africa, the Caribbean, the plantations of the US, and back again, to the academic disciplines of medieval studies and the very fabric of England’s medieval heritage. It argues that England’s medieval past has been a source of tenacious bonds—of family, freedom, slavery, nation, and race—and suggests that better understanding how those bonds were formed and resisted will enable full analysis of their legacy.