New Medieval Poetry Links

Pete SeegerOn the sad occasion of Pete Seeger’s death in 2014, Chris Jones appeared on Radio 3’s The Verb, talking about Seeger’s song ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and its relationship with an age-old poetic device, common in medieval literature. You can read Chris’s blog piece about Seeger and the ubi sunt motif here.

Neil Gaiman, one of the scriptwriters for the 2007 Beowulf movie, came to St Andrews in 2016 to receive an honorary degree. While he was here he took part in an Q&A session, at which he talked about the process of adapting the 1000 year old poem for the big screen. You can read Chris’s blog piece about the film adaptation here.

islamic architecture‘The Middle Ages’ have often inspired or influenced the creation of modern art and literature, but the period and its associated adjective, ‘medieval’, are also sometimes used to describe events that we find tragic or disturbing. Recently these terms have been widely used in the media to talk about ISIS and their brutal beheadings. You can read a blog piece that Chris wrote for the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Young Academy of Scotland about this use of ‘medieval’ and ‘The Middle Ages’ and whether it’s a good thing: http://researchtheheadlines.org/2014/09/18/is-islamic-state-medieval/