David Jones's Medieval Voices: A Review of Poet of the Medieval Modern by Francesca Brooks

Abstract:Especially notable for its new archival research into David Jones's personal library and marginalia, Francesca Brooks's Poet of the Medieval Modern situates Jones's engagement with several significant early medieval texts in The Anathemata as an integral part of the poem's cultural project of articulating a long and living British Catholic history, one that reflects the multiculturalism and multilingualism of the island. Jones's repurposing of the texts for his own project of renewal is both a modern version of medieval compilation—an interpretive arrangement of fragments—and a distinctively modernist re-imagining of a historical archive. Brooks's new research and thorough reassessments of key passages in Jones's poetry represents an impressive contribution to Jones studies and to scholars interested in medieval engagements with modernity and modernist approaches to history and the archive.