Getting creative with medieval landscape fragments: the Hull Maritime Museum, late-medieval poetry, and digital availability

Abstract In this article, I reflect on my creative practice in the poetry pamphlet Exhibits from the Maritime Museum & the City, an output of my poetry residency at the Hull Maritime Museum from 2020 to 2021. Exhibits is intended as an alternative creative guide to the museum. Drawing on an established tradition of contemporary poets who ‘revoice’ medieval texts and landscapes, these poems engage with the fragmentary layered aural, textual, and environmental medieval landscapes of Hull and the Humber estuary as they are mediated through the museum and its collection of objects or artefacts. They collect literary and historical fragments of a medieval landscape of Hull and the Humber to create a sense of place around the gaps in history. Crucially, there is also space for the contemporary reader/visitor to build a bi-directional relationship with medieval landscapes in these gaps. To widen general access to these poems, which is to diversify the revoiced medieval landscapes of Hull and the Humber, I have created a freely available digital version using a simple weebly website: https://exhibitsfromthemaritimemuseum.weebly.com. Influenced by the long tradition of digitizing medieval manuscripts, I discuss the digital materiality of this online version of the contemporary poetry pamphlet Exhibits and how the reader/visitor might use this to engage with and potentially contribute to medieval landscapes.