“THE MIDDLE AGES have formed the paradise of my imagination.” So declares Derek Jarman (1942–94) in an entry in his journal Modern Nature. Here I take the artist at his word. Excavating Jarman's various engagements with medieval culture in his films, writings and other artworks, I ask what purpose this dialogue with the Middle Ages served. As will become apparent in the pages that follow, Jarman had an enduring fascination with texts, paintings, objects and buildings associated with the period we call “the Middle Ages.” Medieval culture was frequently a touchstone for Jarman's creative endeavours, notably insofar as it fostered distinctive ideas of time. But more than simply engaging with a particular historical epoch, Jarman was interested in developing what might be termed a “medieval modern” ethos – an approach to existence that inflected the way he lived.

Painter and poet, filmmaker and set designer, writer and memoirist, gardener and queer activist, Jarman has deservedly acquired a reputation as a visionary polymath. Too often, though, scholarly assessments of his art foreground a single medium, film, at the expense of coming to terms with a truly multidisciplinary body of work. Although film is central to the argument that follows, Jarman's medieval modern frequently disrupts or dissolves the boundaries of art, medium, time and discipline. His medievalisms are multifaceted.

Why medieval modern? As will be explained in Chapter One, “medieval” commonly operates as a negative category of difference, a term signifying that which is not modern. The word designates roughly a millennium of western European history, a middle period between ancient and modern. But it is also a fluid and floating category of otherness, one that operates spatially and morally as well as temporally. Thus, in certain corners of contemporary politics and popular culture, one is as likely to hear the word “medieval” being applied to Islamist terror groups or architectural styles as to a chronologically bounded period. Although derived from seventeenth-century Latin prototypes, “medieval” first entered the English language in the nineteenth century and possessed no currency in the epoch that today is labelled as such. Meanwhile, “modern” is supposed not to have existed in the past at all: it represents the now, or the nearly now.