In Book II of Chaucer’s famous romance Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde is described as listening to Antigone speak of love’s bliss so intently that “she gan to prenten in hire herte faste” (“she began to print [it] in her heart firmly”).Footnote 1 While the modern reader might associate the act of printing with that of the text, the noun “prente” appears in Middle English written records from the turn of the fourteenth century in relation to wax seals, the creation of which requires a hard seal matrix to be pressed into soft wax in order for its image to be replicated.Footnote 2 When the technology for woodcut printing and, later, movable type arrived in England, the term then encompassed these processes too. As the example from Chaucer’s text shows, the verb “prenten” was also used in a figurative sense to convey how something—a feeling, a concept, an experience—might leave a lasting impact on one’s heart, mind, or soul.Footnote 3 The processes, materials, and outcomes related to the process of printing (whether textual or imagistic) proved a useful means for medieval writers to explain how people thought, felt, and experienced the world: they thought about the material experience of printing and creatively transposed it to explain other concepts. In short, they thought through the act of printing. In this article, I will explore how my own experience making medieval-inspired linocuts has encouraged me to think through printing (to “print-think”) about our perception of the medieval today and how it has been crafted.
The partially carved key block of “Salt-in-the-Wound” facing the watercolour and pen sketch of the design.
Figure 1. Long description
On the left is a rectangular, cream-colored linoleum block with a partially carved relief of a mermaid. The carving shows deep gouges where the negative space is removed, leaving raised lines for the figure’s hair, scales, and a circular pearl at the center. On the right is the original reference sketch on white paper, rendered in muted grey and green watercolors with fine pen outlines. The mermaid-like figure is depicted in a fetal position, curled within an oyster-like shell border. Her long, flowing hair wraps around the top, and her tail curves at the bottom right. Handwritten notes and arrows in pen surround the sketch, including a list of colors like light grey, muddy green, and black. A piece of brown masking tape is stuck to the top right corner of the paper.
The green block with the white pearl carved out of the centre, and the key block with the outline of the pearl.
Test impressions of the key block of “Salt-in-the-Wound,” all of which are unintentionally slightly different.
Figure 3. Long description
At the center of the composition is a rectangular, light-colored linoleum or rubber carving block with vertical gouge marks. The block features a dark, inked relief carving of a mermaid with long flowing hair, curled in a fetal position inside a jagged oyster shell. A small circular void is located at the center of the mermaid-like figure’s torso.
Surrounding this central block are eight white rectangular paper slips, each containing a black ink impression of the same design. These impressions are arranged in a radial, fan-like pattern. Due to the nature of test printing, each impression shows slight variations in ink density and clarity. The entire arrangement rests on a rustic wooden surface with visible grain and knots.
Detail of the final three-layered print of “Salt-in-the-Wound”.
I initially started making prints during my doctorate as an entirely recreational activity unrelated to my research, but I quickly found that my creative and critical interests were not as binary as I imagined they might be. By creating prints inspired and informed by the medieval, I have, of course, developed a greater appreciation for the skill and knowledge that would have been required to make their medieval antecedents. The value of reenacting historical crafting practices is now recognised across various subject approaches: experimental archaeology, the book arts, and historical re-enactment to name just a few, as many of the articles in this issue reflect upon. This is also true of the discrete act of printing (of both images and of text), which is used as both a research methodology and as a pedagogical tool. Early-modernist and printmaker Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, for example, has written on her experience of remaking sixteenth-century woodcuts to identify the skills and knowledge that is only realised through the embodied process of making these woodcut prints.Footnote 4 Hands-on experience with letterpress printing, of benefit to research, teaching, and creative practice, is offered by the Bodleian Bibliographical Press, Bristol Common Press, and Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print, to name but a few presses. The value of having students undertake the embodied processes of letterpress printing, as director of Skeuomorph Press and Book Lab Ryan Cordell puts it, “help[s] students think in nuanced ways about the multiple intersections of artistic, economic, and technological vectors in the production of literary works.”Footnote 5 This practical, embodied knowledge leads to a more holistic appreciation of printing and its cultural and historical context.
Yet my own practice is not concerned with authentic recreations of medieval print processes or designs. This is not only because I make linocuts (the blocks of which are made of linoleum, a material that was not invented until the mid-nineteenth century), but also because I am often inspired by material that predates the presence of woodblock printing in England. While my prints draw on some of the visual qualities of late medieval woodcut prints (which were used for textile printing in the mid-fourteenth century, and for block books and block prints from the mid-fifteenth century), I do not often attempt to make copies of them unless practicing. Neither do I make prints in order to better understand the practice of medieval printmaking, as some scholars do. Instead, I use the process of designing, carving, and editioning as a means of thinking about a particular text, and about how my current sense of “the medieval” as a concept has been created and engaged with over time.
While I intuitively recognised this when making my prints, I have not always possessed the language to be able to describe it. Anthropologists and sociologists concerned with craft, however, have provided me with a greater specificity of expression. Tim Ingold has influentially advocated for a means of thinking that mirrors that of a craftsman or artist: that of thinking through making, which he terms “the art of inquiry.”Footnote 6 For Ingold, the art of inquiry is characterised by “the conduct of thought [that] goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work.”Footnote 7 Thinking through materials and processes, Ingold explains, resists “the engineering [of] a confrontation between ideas ‘in the head’ and facts ‘on the ground,’” and instead results in a reciprocity between material experience and intellectual or affective responses that triggers an engagement different to that achieved through more conventional academic practices.Footnote 8 As Ingold writes, crafting results in a process whereby “these materials think in us, as we think through them.”Footnote 9
In this article, I will explain how my experience creating linocut prints inspired by the medieval has functioned, to borrow Ingold’s phrase, as an “art of inquiry.” The various practical processes involved with making a medieval-inspired print have made me consider how our current sense of the medieval has been crafted over time and, more specifically, how it has been impacted by print illustration. In doing so, my experience making prints has encouraged me to think through the material practices that I employ—to think with printing, or “print-think,” as a shorthand. This article will consider two of the discrete material crafting processes required to make a linocut—carving the block to create a relief, and the creation of an impression—and will explain how each of these crafting processes has encouraged me to think about how our current perception of medieval texts and “the medieval” as an imaginative category has been crafted. To do so, I will reflect on one particular printing project: a lino print I made to accompany Laura Varnam’s poem “The Name of the Father,” which takes its name, “Salt-in-the-Wound,” directly from Varnam’s poem’s final line.Footnote 10
1. Relief
Creating the linocut “Salt-in-the-Wound” led me to more carefully consider the process of carving a relief print, and how the material metaphor of relief carving might be a useful means of “thinking through” the representation of Grendel’s Mother as one that has been carved out through its long legacy. After creating a design and transferring this design onto a linoleum block (or drawing directly onto it), the printmaker needs to carve away the material that they do not wish to appear on the print. This is achieved by using tools with metal gouges that are either V-shaped, which create sharp and fine lines, or U-shaped, which can remove large areas of lino quickly. The areas that have not been carved will receive ink and transfer it to the printing substrate (paper or cloth, for example), while the areas that have been carved away sit too low for the ink to transfer. Figure 1 shows the partially carved keyblock — the block that pulls the shapes and lines of the other layers together to form a cohesive image. This process of creating a relief can be used to different effects. When creating a monochrome print, carved lines can form an outline of a subject; a positive image can be created by removing the negative space around it; or carving can be used to create tonal variation by making different kinds of marks (e.g., crosshatching or stippling). Those new to relief printing often find this a considerably different way of thinking about creating an image when compared to painting or drawing, as it requires the maker to think in relief.
This subtractive process can be a useful analogy to bring to texts: which subjects are not represented in a narrative, and which are consequently brought into relief? Whose voices or which qualities have been carved away through editorial incisions, and which remain? Varnam’s poetry on the women of the Old English epic poem Beowulf already thinks in relief. Her poems are concerned with the women of the text who are “not allowed to speak for themselves,” and her poems published in Primers (2024) form a collection concerned with Grendel’s Mother, the nameless female antagonist whom Beowulf fights in a protracted under-mere combat after he kills her son.Footnote 11 Varnam’s poem “The Name of the Father” investigates a subject that is never explicated in the text itself—who Grendel’s father is and how he was conceived. Varnam’s poem infills this lacuna from Beowulf and offers a narrative whereby Grendel is potentially the product of rape and sexual violence (“He made me a monster when he made me a mother,” l.14). In doing so, Varnam also responds to the editorial history of the poem, which has repeatedly magnified the monstrous qualities of Grendel’s Mother, and belied the forms of monstrous behaviour that she herself is victim to.Footnote 12
The pearl at the centre of the print was inspired by the association Varnam cultivates between Grendel’s Mother and oysters. Varnam’s poem begins with Grendel’s Mother “diving for oysters” (l.1), and she too is then rendered oyster-like as she is “shucked and sucked dry” (l.8). In the conclusive line of the poem, the poetic voice (that of Grendel’s Mother) reflects on her perception of her son as her “salt-in-the-wound” (l.15). Varnam’s use of the idiom reminded me of the process by which oysters produce pearls: an irritant enters the protective membrane of the mollusc and is gradually coated with layers of calcium carbonite that results in the creation of a lustrous gemstone. The pearl which sits at the centre of the print, surrounded by the curled body of Grendel’s Mother, represents the zygote that will grow to become Grendel; the “salt-in-the-wound” (l.15) who is both a treasure and a tragedy (due to the mode of his conception and his later violent death) to his mother.
The pearl itself responds to the idea of presence and absence. To create the white pearl, I needed to carve linoleum away from the blocks I used to make the print so that the colour of the paper could shine through the layers of black, grey, and green ink—I needed to make a material subtraction. This is shown in Figure 2, where two blocks have a circular shape carved out of the centre of the design. But to do so I had to give physical attention to the linoleum (through the act of carving away material), just as Varnam had given it textual attention. Because of this, there is something of a material paradox in the middle of the print. It is representative of an absence that is mirrored by the print-block as the shape of the pearl is carved away from the linoleum, but this subtractive act has made the pearl present. The pearl becomes representative, through the medium of relief print, of the provocative tension between the presence and absence of monstrous beings in Beowulf, and that between Beowulf’s Grendel’s Mother and Varnam’s Grendel’s Mother.
2. Impression
“Salt-in-the-Wound” depicts a medieval subject that far predates the use of woodcut prints in England. Furthermore, it does so through an engagement with a twenty-first-century poem, and by using a printmaking method that far post-dates even late medieval woodcut printing. Because of this, it represents an amalgamation of impressions: those of the original Old English text and its critical legacy, those of Varnam’s poem, and those of printmakers of recent centuries who have established printmaking as evocative, if not representative, of medieval visual culture. “Salt-in-the-Wound” is at once a unique physical impression, but it is also a product of various compounded figurative impressions that have impacted both my own perception of medieval literature and culture as I understand it, and the medieval as an imaginative category.
In the first instance, “Salt-in-the-Wound” is a literal impression. Once the relief is carved, the block is inked using a brayer (a rolling tool which is used to spread the ink into an even layer and transfer it to the block for printing). A sheet of paper is placed on the inked block, and pressure is applied using a press or hand-held tools so that the design transfers across. The print created is not referred to as a “copy,” but an “impression.” This is because even with the most skilled printmaker there is likely to be some deviation between each print due to ink viscosity, paper texture, or human interference. “Salt-in-the-Wound” was made by rubbing over the back of the paper with a wooden spoon; a slow process but one which ensures the ink adheres to the paper consistently. Figure 3 shows the key block surrounded by some test prints, all of which differ slightly in appearance both from one another and from the block itself. In designing my print, I was responding to Varnam’s creative-critical textual response to Beowulf (her “impression”), but as I was enacting this process of physically making impressions, I also thought more generally about how print depictions influence our understanding of the medieval. What kind of figurative impressions might influential printmakers’ output have had on my own piece? In what ways do post-medieval print illustrations impact the impression of the medieval we have now?
Relief and intaglio prints, or other forms like digital renderings and tattoos that mimic the quality of these prints, are often used to depict medieval subjects. This is, in part, a response to the medieval visual material culture which survives today. Despite the waves of censorship and iconoclasm that accompanied the Protestant Reformation, medieval print illustrations in books and on indulgences have endured, even if they have been defaced or are accompanied by admonishing inscriptions.Footnote 13 Their survival means that the particular visual qualities of the medieval woodcut—the heavy outlining, the marionette-like body positioning and the often-impassive facial expressions, the use of parallel lines to indicate shading or light—have become emblematic of the visual culture of late medieval Britain and Europe. While it is of course true that this style is also evidenced in other late medieval visual culture which survives today (e.g., stained glass windows), medieval woodblock prints can perhaps be more readily credited for this aesthetic proliferation precisely because of their replicability, and the ease through which modern materials and methods can be used to broadly replicate the manner of their making, too.
Print illustrations are also frequently used to depict subjects which precede and proceed the late medieval span in which woodcut illustrations were employed. The association of the medieval with the aesthetics of print can perhaps be credited to the artists and publishers of the nineteenth century who used woodcuts and other relief printing methods to accompany their publications of medieval texts. Consider, for example, William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, which published many modernised translations of medieval texts which pre-date print technology (e.g., The Tale of Beowulf) but which created an associative link between print illustration and early medieval texts. Although it should be acknowledged that Kelmscott Press books were expensive and had limited press runs (therefore limiting its audience), the impact of its publications on the book arts in their immediate wake, and of the later, cheaper facsimiles for a broader readership, still stands.Footnote 14
Print artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century (a particular interest of mine) consequently found print a useful means of conjuring a sense of the medieval, and propagated the association between print and the medieval to a wider audience. Edward Bawden produced a series of lino print illustrations for the three-volume Folio Society edition of Malory’s Chronicles of King Arthur. Footnote 15 David Gentleman’s famous murals at Charing Cross Underground station depict the creation of the Eleanor Cross (the memorial built by King Edward I in memory of his wife, Eleanor of Castile, who died in 1290) and are wood engravings, a technique developed by the naturalist Thomas Bewick. More recently, Michael Smith has illustrated his translated editions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, William of Palerne (as The Romance of William and the Werewolf), and the Alliterative Morte Arthure (as The Death of King Arthur) with characterful linocut prints, while Amy Jeffs’ popular Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain and Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain, collections of stories drawn from medieval sources, are accompanied by woodcut prints which do not attempt to replicate the style of medieval examples but are of her own distinctive monochrome style.Footnote 16
The visual qualities of a late medieval woodcut conjure and reconfirm our perception of the aesthetics of the medieval—no matter whether these prints are made using non-medieval materials, depict non-medieval subjects, or are used to represent texts and subjects which pre- or post-date the historical employment of woodblock printed images. In this way, print depictions of the medieval are often what M. J. Toswell describes as a “simulacrum of the medieval,” in that they both reflect and project ideas about the medieval as an imaginative category, rather than a historical reality.Footnote 17 Relief and intaglio prints become a visual shorthand for gesturing towards the medieval as a miasmic aesthetic classification that draws upon, but is not tied to, extant medieval prints.
The process of creating impressions of the “Salt-in-the-Wound,” encouraged me to think more about what constitutes our impression of Grendel’s Mother specifically, but also of “the medieval” as an imaginative category. Linocut printmaking is a method that conjures a sense of the medieval, but its materials, processes, and subjects are often distinctly non-medieval. The act of making an impression, like that of creating “Salt-in-the-Wound,” is representative of our modern engagement with medieval culture (Figure 4 shows a detail of the full three-layer print). While I might try to carve a way back through literary history and foreshorten the time between the medieval moment and our own, I will ultimately always be influenced by the myriad impressions (of which I am both conscious and unconscious) that have stamped their influence in the intervening time.
*
My experience in print-thinking, in what Ingold might call a “art of inquiry,” has solidified the value of creative-critical practice for my own engagement with medieval texts and their legacy. It has developed my ability to think laterally and with more attention. While I may have reached the same conclusions about Beowulf’s lacunae, the responsiveness of Varnam’s “The Name of the Father,” and the construction of the imaginative category of “the medieval” as influenced by print by reading scholarly publications, I think I have thought more deeply, sustainedly, and idiosyncratically in arriving at them through print-think. As Ingold frequently emphasises (and italicises), I had to do it for myself.
Glenn Adamson writes that “craft is not a defined practice but a way of thinking through practices of all kinds.”Footnote 18 The act of crafting, no matter what diverse mediums and methods might be used, encourages the crafter to engage with the process of thinking through. This “thinking through,” as this article has posited, encourages a reciprocal relationship between the materials and processes of crafting and intellectual reflection, whereby neither is prioritised but both are developed. By thinking with or through materials, rather than only of them, we can, perhaps, foster a different but equally rich means of considering the medieval, how our understanding of it has been crafted, and what it means to us now.
Author contributions
Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing: E.B.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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