Medieval Saints and Modern Screens - Now Open Access

February is dark and cold and hard. It feels like it’s been a long winter, in all senses: literally, professionally, politically, personally, collectively, all of it. The Götterdämmerung that began in late 2016 is reaching a crescendo, if we can even believe that this is a bad as it gets. Maybe this is just the beginning of Act 2, when shit really hits the fan: Brexit is in the past tense; we have exited Europe. Don’t worry, the Tories will see us through (emphatic /s, in case that wasn’t crystal clear). Sources of joy and WINNING-ness are thin on the ground right now. The point of all this grimdark scene-setting is to throw into relief just how incandescently good some good news I just received feels, like a beacon of light for which I am viscerally grateful. (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about already, then I may need to increase the font-size for post titles.) The glad tidings hit my inbox, leaving me all a-twitter, so I - of course - took to Twitter to talk it through.

Logistical note: Unlatching is ongoing, and so Medieval Saints and Modern Screens apparently doesn’t yet appear fully Open Access on some platforms (e.g. JSTOR). Whilst whatever behind-the-scenes magic needs to happen across platforms takes its time, the OAPEN catalogue entry is live and in full-colour right this second. You literally just have to click on the “download book” button, and hey presto. You can also download the full .pdf through the Amsterdam University Press website, by “buying” the eBook edition for the princely sum of €0.00.

If you’d like a flavour of Medieval Saints and Modern Screens (to try before you don’t buy, so to speak), take a look at the various reviews online: Medievally Speaking, The Medieval Review, H-France, The English Historical Review, MEDIENWissenschaften, Film & History, and Screen.

If you want more of a Pinterest-y moodboard for the book - or at least the thrust of Chapter 3, with a soupçon of the Introduction - then check out this post right here. This is the keynote I gave at the 2018 Gender and Medieval Society conference, using the bones of Chapter 3 on Margery Kempe and/as Kim Kardashian West, and vice versa. Replete with images and a fair few gifs, it’s basically the visual album counterpart to the published text. There’s new stuff there too, feeding into and from the book’s critique of the politics of visibility for women, but (re)situated within the context of academic precarity.

Prefer your content in audio? I got you. Listen to me talk about the book - and more generally, feminist approaches to the Middle Ages - in conversation with Hetta Howes, Elizabeth Robertson and host Shahidha Bari on an episode of the BBC’s Arts and Ideas show (full transcript and embedded audio at link).

If you want to talk about the book, snag a review (hard)copy, or just have a natter, then drop me a note on Twitter or through the contact form.