Dreaming the House of Fame Again This publication brings together work produced in workshops held at King’s College London on 12, 13, and 17 October 2016, entitled ‘Playing with Medieval Visions, Sounds and Sensations’. The purpose of the sessions was to encourage creative interaction with medieval culture. The workshops took their focus as the Old English poem known as The Dream of the Rood and Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame. The Dream of the Rood survives in a single late-tenth-century manuscript, although it shares some text with the Ruthwell Monument and the Brussels Cross, two earlier pieces of sculptural art. The House of Fame is one of Chaucer’s most celebrated texts and was written in the second half of the fourteenth century. The two poems share an interest in memory, textual, verbal, and material culture, and the creative possibilities of the imagination. Participants in the workshops were asked to respond to and remake the poems according to their own interests, practices and desires. This booklet brings together some of the work produced in the workshops on Chaucer’s House of Fame. Organised by Fran Allfrey, with Francesca Brooks, Carl Kears, Charlotte Knight, Charlotte Rudman, and Beth Whalley.
‘Playing with Medieval Visions, Sounds and Sensations’ was part of King’s College London’s Arts & Humanities Festival 2016, supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Institute and the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies.
This house dances! it circles - it never stops it is led by the wind a lightbox made of twigs fragile pieces carefully woven multiple eyes all over its body it whirrs and grates like the whirr of construction drills and s--- cranes developing Greenwich docks shoutingmen in hard hats this home is tilting sounds without the shouting men the only shouts are rumours alive and passing on the river.
Some lines from Geoffry Chaucer’s House of Fame 119-150, 765-796, 1919-1950 Collaborators at King’s College, London, 13 October 2016