Through the Mists of Time: Reflections on Recreating Medieval and Early Modern Literary Texts for Children of Today

Marcia Williams discusses her reimagining of several medieval and early modern literary texts in the form of picture books for children, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s Plays. Her chapter illuminates the process by which, in reimagining a classic literary text, she strives at once to make it her own and to bring a freshness to it that will make it accessible to a contemporary child reader, while maintaining a strong link to the original. In asking herself where is the space for the modern child reader, she seeks to give her reader a foothold in the original author’s world and at the same time edge them towards taking a leap into the unknown.