It is often hard, when studying, to describe what you are working on without boring people. The distinct look of someone who is sorry they asked is not far from the mind of many students of traditionally inaccessible subjects. It’s rare that people who ask really want to know, but for the few that do, it’s quite revealing how they respond. This experience is common in studying medieval literature – not many people care about what you have to say historically, but when it comes to retelling a story, they become engaged. Exaggerating and elaborating a tale from The Canterbury Tales or Gawain and the Green Knight, one realises how engaging these stories are, while also realising how inaccessible they can be when someone asks to read it for themselves. While translations can be valuable, there is a sense in which one wants to be told it straight from the horse’s mouth, so they often seem flat. The inception of the Medieval Ideas Creative Laboratory, led by Professor Antony Bale, seems to have anticipated such a sentiment – and responded to it.

“The performance managed to capture the original medieval suspense alone and with limited props”

Its first event of the year, ‘Telling Stories from Medieval England and Ireland’, saw two spoken-word performances by Debbie Cannon (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and Lara McClure (‘Oral Tradition’). Debbie Cannon emerged on sparse stage carrying a small bundle of items about to be sent to a convent following her husband’s death. The narrative of Gawain’s quest to exchange a blow with the Green Knight was told through the perspective of the now older widow the lord Gawain stays with. Cannon captures the visceral intrigue of an Arthurian knight as well as the sense of subdual that the lord’s wife, who falls in love with Gawain, resists. It stands as a testament to both Cannon and the story that this performance managed to capture the original medieval suspense alone and with limited props.

Cannon wrote her own passages from the widow’s perspective of becoming an older woman in society, facing accusations of being ‘past her prime’ while recalling the nostalgic love of Gawain and the Arthurian court. The perspective of the Lord’s wife, forced to marry, manages to capture the essence of Arthurian mythology in the very tangible presence it had on Medieval society, presenting the mytho-historicised court of the time and its intersection with literature. The performance was consistently assured and seemed to provide something both to those who had studied Gawain, and those new to it; my only regret is that I didn’t bring more people to the performance. It felt as though Cannon’s performance managed to get past issues of translation and accessibility – and the project became clear during the performance. Simply put, it was medieval to anyone.

“Simply put, it was medieval to anyone”

Lara McClure’s performance of stories from Iron Age Ulster saw a fusion of storytelling from Ireland’s epic tale The Táin, with the wonderful humour of exaggeration. From the pelvis of a hundred-year-old man being shattered by a woman trying to mount him in order to make a king of Ulster, to a Queen with an insatiable sexual appetite having sex with the whole of Leinster, McClure’s performance was hysterical. Through telling how three women in Iron Age Ulster used their bodies and sex, McClure was able to do justice to one of Ireland’s most wonderful creative pieces of literature. She focused more on the fabric of storytelling and the use of exaggeration, bringing a mostly unknown piece of literature (in the eyes of an English audience) to life. Through a distinctly Irish tradition of oral storytelling preserved by monks in early Christian Ireland, McClure also brought a historicism to the forefront which considered the need for storytelling. This feature of organically bringing context into the fabric of the tale felt like the distinguishing feature in both performances; where Cannon acted the spurned lover of the Green Knight, McClure considered exaggeration and the formation of the art of storytelling.

It feels safe to say that the accessibility of medieval stories was cracked in these performances. Were the texts completely covered? No, but it doesn’t seem to matter when the performance is anything but abridged, laden with a rich sense of storytelling which develops the texts. The purity of the text seemed not to matter as such; the audience could have retold these stories when they left, and passed them on. In a very tangible sense we left with the stories.