research – Francesca Brooks

A Quest for the Camaldolese Grail in the Footsteps of Lynette Roberts

Image of a kneeling angel in the Camaldolese Gradual

I have a longish essay in the current issue of PN Review (295), ‘A Quest for the Camaldolese Grail in the Footsteps of Lynette Roberts’. It’s the first thing I’ve had published about the Argentine-born, Welsh writer Lynette Roberts (1909-95), who is one of the subjects of my current research project on ‘Haunted Archives’ and women rewriting the medieval past. The essay is about access to cultural heritage, impostor syndrome, material and sensorial encounters with medieval manuscripts, and the fascinating writing life of Roberts herself.

An illuminated rubric in the Camaldolese Grail

I thought I would share a brief post here with some images of the Camaldolese Grail (the subject of my quest and of Roberts’ parallel quest in the 1940s), as the piece is unillustrated in PN Review. The Camaldolese Grail (or Gradual) is a stunning illuminated fourteenth-century manuscript from Italy, now held by the Victoria And Albert Museum Art Library. I went to see it after reading Roberts’ essay on the manuscript (published in the 1940s in a journal known as Life & Letters) and took great pleasure in spending time with this gorgeous, gilded object.

Detail from one of the illuminations in the Camaldolese Grail

Here’s a little snippet from the essay, demonstrating why Roberts’ essay had filled me with such curiosity:

‘Roberts writes about mushroom shades and mole tones and pink blancmange rocks. She draws our attention to the lines on a lake which do not depict ice, although she might forgive us for thinking so, but as she describes them appear to curve ‘like bleached seaweed, oriental eyelashes, or flayed wheat’. Arguing for why she thinks we see Lorenzo Monaco’s hand in this ostentatious, gilded manuscript, she writes that ‘[t]he miniatures which I have studied have the same pink blanc-mange rocks, the dark polished trees, lined haloes, heavy eye-shadow, and drooping mouths terminating in small dots’ of the paintings she has observed in the National Gallery. Roberts doesn’t simply describe the manuscript. She uses her poet’s eye to vividly evoke her aesthetic and material encounter with this sacred object, producing a surreal portrait of a book that seems to distort time under her gaze.’

Another detail from the illuminations in the Camaldolese Grail

My visit to the Art Library didn’t go perfectly smoothly, however, and it was this experience of fear, trepidation, and even shame, as well as what this revealed about the significance of Roberts’s own encounter with the manuscript, that became the focus of the essay. I don’t want to repeat the story here (you’ll have to buy a copy of the journal), but what I initially ordered in the library wasn’t the manuscript at all – it was an itemised collection of waste materials from the manuscript’s restoration in 2009!

A small glass bottle containing some waste from the manuscript’s restoration

If you’ve never heard of Lynette Roberts before, and haven’t read any of her poetry, then you’re in for a treat, as Carcanet are publishing a new and expanded edition of her poems next month.

Creative Re-creation and Translation: Edwin Morgan, Derek Jarman & the archive

Last month, ahead of the launch of issue 15.2, two pieces I wrote or co-wrote were published with postmedieval: a journal of medieval culture studies. Both gave me the opportunity to write and think more about Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks in the University of Glasgow Archives, and to reflect on how my month spent with them in 2022 has continued to shape my creative and critical practice.

For the first piece, ‘Medieval re-creation and translation in the archives of Derek Jarman and Edwin Morgan: A Dialogue’, I spent several months corresponding with the artist and writer E. K. Myerson over email in a kind of ‘show and tell’. As our creative-critical conversation unfolded in 2023, we discussed the queer medievalisms of Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman, and reflected on what it means to be a medievalist working in a modern archive where we might feel more intimately connected with the touch and desires of the subjects of our research. In the second half of our conversation we shared how we had each responded creatively to our encounter with the archive: I, by making a Glasgow scrapbook of collage pages and page-spreads, and Myerson by working on a Jarmanesque film called ‘A submerged reliquary of a Kentish saint’.

Screenshot of one of Morgan’s scrapbook pages published in the postmedieval article

The second piece I wrote was an ‘About the Cover’ text, after postmedieval‘s editors asked if they could use one of Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook page-spreads on the cover of the issue. This was a really enjoyable invitation to spend more time slowly and closely reading a single page from the vast and unruly scrapbooks (3600 pages in total). I let myself be drawn in by a single image from Scrapbook 1, a panel from the early-eighth-century Franks Casket, and wondered (in a speculative and open-ended sense) if this might be the key to unlocking the whole composition.

Morgan’s use of an image from the Casket is a knowing and playful gesture. It invites us to actively engage with the tangled material of the scrapbook page-spread. A reader of the scrapbooks forges new connections as they move around the page and through the books via different routes. There is no one way to read or unlock the scrapbook page. We should revel in its riddling multiplicity.

Huge thanks are due here to Hannah Armstrong and Rebecca Menmuir who organised a workshop on Medieval Forgeries in 2022, where I met E. K. Myerson, and then invited us all to contribute to a Forgeries Essay cluster for postmedieval journal. They have been brilliant editors and collaborators.

I haven’t stopped thinking and working with Morgan’s scrapbooks yet – last week I co-ran a workshop with Fran Allfrey and Carl Kears (as part of Revoicing Medieval Poetry) at the IONA conference at King’s College London, where I led an exercise inspired by Morgan’s techniques of scrapbooking, assemblage and collage.

Collages in response to the Old English Pharoah poem made by Lisa Weston (left) and Heather Maring (right)

In the workshop I asked how the material/tactile/visual process of collage might allow us to explore the outer-reaches of a text we were beginning to translate from Old English into new language? How might working associatively and impulsively with found visual and verbal materials (old magazines, newspapers and books) inform the subterranean architecture of a translation? The workshop was really enjoyable, and it’s formed one of a series I’ve run this summer exploring collage poetry, cut-up text, and writing with scissors, in York, Manchester and London. I would love to run more creative workshops like this – so feel free to be in touch if you have a budget and this is of interest!

Scrapbooking Old English with Edwin Morgan

I spent March in Glasgow for a Research Fellowship with the Archives and Special Collections of the University Library, long delayed from 2020 because of the pandemic. I had been dreaming of Glasgow for a long time, often through the poetry of Scots Makar and Glasgow Laureate Edwin Morgan, whose archive my fellowship research was focused on.

Glasgow’s iconic Duke of Wellington statue with a cone on his head, and a seagull on the horse’s rear. The cone is yarn-bombed with the colours of the Ukrainian flag.

This week the Library published a blogpost that I wrote about my work with Morgan’s ‘vast, unruly and magnificent’ scrapbooks and their relationship to the early medieval poetry, such as Beowulf, that Morgan was translating in the early part of his career.

[In the scrapbooks] medieval fragments jostle for space alongside pictures of jellyfish, sea anemones and goose barnacles, photographs of blasted snow-bound mountains, or surreptitious allusions to queer desire, as well as news items about cosmic rays and potential radio transmissions intercepted from outer space.
Scrapbooking old english – ‘the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush’

MS Morgan C/1 p225-226 – this double-page spread shows a print of a jellyfish facing a panel from the early medieval Franks Casket

Putting together the blogpost and going back over my research notes made me realise just how much I had to say about Morgan’s scrapbooks. If Morgan’s desire for his translations of medieval texts was that ‘the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush’, this had certainly been the effect on me of the visio-verbal scrapbooks and collages. Perhaps I will try and find another venue to write about the inspiration my research with Morgan provided for my own evening collage sessions in Glasgow.