Scents of the Middle Ages and emo nostalgia – what you should read, watch and do this week

I’ve always been a history nerd, but it wasn’t until I started working at The Conversation that I really caught the medieval bug. Inspired by our academic experts, I’ve read books, trawled online archives, and when I worked on an article about the Book of Kells earlier this year, I had to travel to Dublin to see it for myself.

And so it is that this week I found myself booking tickets to London to visit Medieval Women: In Their Own Words at the British Library, an exhibition our reviewer, expert in medieval women’s writing Diane Watt, described as “unmissable”.

I’m particularly excited to see the way that some of the earliest works by women to have been written in English are brought to life in a scent installation. Julian of Norwich’s satanic torments, for example, are conjured up by the stink of sulphur, while Margery Kempe’s angels are evoked by notes of honey, strawberry and caramel.

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Medieval Women: In Their Own Words at the British Library is unmissable

Dystopian fiction and unsettling realities

There’s been a lot of noise about Dahomey, the latest documentary film from award-winning French director Mati Diop since it picked up the coveted Golden Bear, the top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. The film follows the restitution of 26 items that were looted by French troops during an invasion and subsequent colonial occupation of the kingdom of Dahomey, now the present-day Republic of Benin, in November 1892.

What makes the film particularly unique is Diop’s decision to give a literal voice to the artefacts in question. Viewers follow “object 26”, a statue of King Ghezo who ruled Dahomey from 1797 until 1818, as he narrates his journey from a storage unit in a French museum, back to his homeland. It gave our reviewer, curator of living cultures at Manchester Museum Njabulo Chipangura, much to reflect on.

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Dahomey: timely repatriation documentary gives a literal voice to Benin’s stolen objects

For my money, Ali Smith is one of the greatest living British authors. My first encounter with her work was the stunning 2014 book How to Be Both, which applied the fresco technique of visual arts to the novel. Weaving together the stories of a renaissance artist and a 16-year-old girl in contemporary Cambridge, the order in which you read the story depended on which copy you picked up.

With her latest book, Gliff, Smith continues to play with form. It tells the story of two children, Briar and Rose, as they navigate a post-apocalyptic Britain. Gliff is the first of a planned pair of novels, with the second to be called Glyph. Our reviewer found the novel’s combination of dystopian nightmare and fairy tale enchantment at once accessible and engaging, complex and subtle.

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Ali Smith’s new novel Gliff is a dystopian nightmare with flashes of fairytale enchantment

Emo nostalgia

There’s no more appropriate time to visit an exhibition on the work of Tim Burton than Halloween weekend. That is, unless you’re one of those people that insist The Nightmare Before Christmas is actually a Christmas film. Newly opened at the Design Museum, The World of Tim Burton is an exploration of the director’s design practice, and traces the complex path from his initial sketches to their realisation on screen.

Our reviewer, expert in the gothic Catherine Spooner, found much to enjoy. She described the work on show as “a riot of colour and fizzing line”, though it was the personal items she found most thrilling – teen fan art, scribbles on table napkins and university lecture notes.

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Is Tim Burton an outsider auteur or a global megastar? The Design Museum thinks it has the answer

As a teenager, I spent hours carefully curating my Myspace page. In my “profile photo” I wore black skinny jeans and doodled-on Converse. My “profile song” was almost always something by My Chemical Romance. Each generation has their defining subculture and for mine, young millennials, that subculture was emo (short for “emotional hardcore”).

In a move that seems designed to make me feel ancient, emo is now the subject of a nostalgic exhibition at London’s Barbican Music Library. The show features much of the technology that emo teens used to build a sense of community, from those Myspace profiles to flip phones and iPod shuffles. While many of these technologies are long gone, the exhibition argues that emo remains alive and kicking.

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Medieval Women: In Their Own Words at the British Library is unmissable

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