Afterword: Migrations

The Afterword is framed by a reading of Caroline Bergvall’s text and performance Drift (2013) and explores ideas of migration across time and space. Using Thomas Nail’s recent work on the figure of the migrant and Paul Zumthor’s celebrated work on ‘mouvance’ the Afterword asks, following Sara Ahmed’s work on orientation, what cultural possibilities emerge if we celebrate the diversity, multiplicity and untimeliness of ideas of the Middle Ages, rather than attempt to limit or define it. It suggest that medievalist acts of cultural memory often rely on an idea of the Middles Ages as singular, closed-off and stable, but nevertheless demonstrate its multiplicity, openness and indeterminacy.